Welcome to Karen Hunter is awesome. I am having an amazing conversation with Howard French,

and we're going to continue it in this episode with the fall of Patrice Lumumba and the rise of Russia. Yeah, there's a lot of

Russia information, a lot of stories, news stories about Russia and Putin. But before there was a Putin,

there was a Nikita Khrushchev. And before that, y'all got to stay tuned to hear how we got here.

All right. Howard French, the second emancipation is the book. You must have that in your library. And you must listen to what we're going to talk about next. Stay tuned. We're in similar generations, I think. I'm a little bit older than I am, maybe. I don't know. I can't tell. Black being what it is. But we were all raised to fear Russia and to think that Russia was the enemy.

To watch where we are now as it relates to Russia is confusing at best.

You know, also if you're a student of the Harlem Renaissance or if you, you know,

love Paul Robson, as we all love Paul Robeson and others. You recognize that Russia understands the

black plight in a way, or they've been able to exploit it, but they're also our enemy.

How do we look at that? And for right now, for Africa, you have China, you have Arabs in

Ghana in particular. If you go there, some of the most developed places are, you know, the grocery stores and things run by folk who are Islamic. And, you know, I don't know Russia's connection to China, but they used to be in league with one another. Are they still like, can you just give us a like a back of the notepad

sketch of where we are versus where that was then because the red scare was a big deal.

McCarthyism before that, you know, everyone, you had to pledge allegiance. And I think we're

about to do that again, except we have to me, a president that's compromised, whether

there's North Korea or Russia, I don't understand where we are. It doesn't make any sense.

Well, if I can wind the tape and go a little back into the past, I would break things down this

way. Stalin, who was the leader in the early period of the Soviet Union, was not interested in the so-called third world.

He was not interested in Africa.

He thought that the future of the world would be decided in the Eurasian landmass, in the

competition between capitalism and socialism.

And the Soviet Union's job was to bring as much of Europe over to its side as possible.

And Stalin had very little time to think about any other part of the world, with the exception of China, right?

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