Vijay Prashad

So first you have Zelensky, who has sold the blood of his young male to the Europeans for a few billion.

You have MBS, who is responsible for skinning alive a journalist from the Washington Post.

You have the head of Syria, who is a former al-Qaeda chief.

Al-Qaeda and

We were touring with the former prime minister of Australia, the former prime minister of New Zealand.

Hey, aren't they in the five eyes, both of them? And yet there they were, sitting with me and with Glenn Deason.

We were touring with the former president of Ethiopia, with distinguished journalist, Vijay Prashad with broadcasters, opinion formers, leaders, makers from all over the world.

It's been an amazing couple of weeks.

I mean, it really does come down to actually doing, right? Take that knowledge and go from knowledge to praxis.

And you know, Vijay Prashad, who is another Marxist-Leninist, he talked about this at length as well.

Um, Ali Qadri, who is a Middle Eastern Marxist scholar, said the same thing as well.

This is, this is the recurring theme, and getting people to realize that, yeah, it's great to have a great message.

They pay as you earn.

So you should read the book by Dr. Griff Cheloa and Vijay Prashad.

That book is powerful.

And Griff Chenua, even yesterday, he commented, and this is what he said about the price increase, I mean, the announcement of the IMF coming back in our country.

And when I think of that number, 32 million, that's the entire Malaysian population.

So how do you even brain something like this? Vijay Prashad from the Tri-Continental always says we can't just go and lecture third world countries to reduce carbon emissions when Europe and US used a lot of carbon emissions to develop.

So I don't know how to square that circle.

I think a subject, a topic of the book, Climate Shock by Gernot Wagner and Martin Weizmann is the main argument is that we should start pricing in these kind of climate costs when it comes to our societies.

I'll, I will point everyone to, um, the Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective, uh, response to the letter.

You had also brought up, um, Vijay Prashad's response, um, to the letter, and I don't know if you wanna summarize that before I kind of like summarize, um, our collective's response.

Yeah, absolutely.

So, um, yeah, I really encourage that folks-- I really encourage folks to check out Vijay's, uh, response to the letter.

It was published by the International People's Assembly.

Um, and, you know, he, he provides the, um, kind of argument that one might expect from, from Vijay Prashad, and an argument that I share, which is basically that, you know, like there's a time and a place to make certain kinds of critiques.

And in a moment like this, when there is an actual immediate kinetic confrontation between Iran as an anti-imperialist force and then the forces of American and Zionist imperialism, and in a moment where the anti-imperialist resistance of Iran has the forces of empire on the back foot.

I mean, Iran is militarily prevailing right now in many ways.

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the program.

In this hour, we're going to be giving what the TV networks like to call an encore presentation of an interview I did last year with writer and activist Vijay Prashad on a topic that I call revolutionary optimism, because I think we could all use a little optimism right now.

So we'll be right back after this.

This is The Zero Hour with Richard, RJ Eskow.

Check out our free video archives at youtube.com slash thezerohour.

And we are back on the Zero Hour.

Joining me once again, I always look forward to speaking with him, is Vijay Prashad.

Vijay is a writer, columnist, author.

But Guterres, what has he done? Why wasn't...

I heard Vijay Prashad making the point that there's a perfect UN establishment in Geneva.

Why wasn't it held there, given that Trump prevented people from travelling last year as well? Some of the Iranian delegation weren't allowed to travel.

So why wasn't it in Geneva? Because the Swiss wouldn't stop anybody from going.

I would call China's organization of the economy left corporatist, for sure.

I mean, that's one of the... held up as a shining example of how to... basically subdue your capitalist class, not allowing them to organize as a class, as Vijay Prashad has said.

I mean, right.

It's not that China is fascist.

Like, when socialism actually took root, it took root in what...

The historian Vijay Prashad called the Darker Nations.

Right.

And, you know, like growing up, that was kind of the model that I learned from, you know, Cabral and Sankara later.

Because the communists had a much more aggressive policy of trying to achieve the issues of what is going on with the Black community, as opposed to, quite frankly, our democratic socialist brethren.

Bob, do you want to answer on that?

I mean, I'm, I'm a historian, so I'm always living in the past anyway, and I'm a bit older, so I don't, I mean, to answer your question, I don't know why people can't see the unity of that.

It doesn't make sense to me because again, I was kind of, you know, brought up that way and I study the past.