Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

"In this realm domestic and foreign policy cannot be cleanly separated; presenting an economically secure alternative to military service is the key to advancing the cause of justice both at home and abroad." A strong welfare state could be a blow against imperialism

"A recent “Letter Against US Imperialism” by leftist intellectuals such as Angela Davis, Vijay Prashad, Robin Kelley, and Hamid Dabashi denounces the latest Iranian mass uprising and continues the old pattern. It attributes the latest protests in Iran to “Iranian native informants and cheerleaders who serve as functionaries of US imperialism.” It argues that the Iranian masses only want “stability” and “reform” but not regime change. The claims in the letter simply do not match the reality on the ground." Shameful, to say the least.  Why the latest uprising in Iran matters

Writings on the column: "We want to burn your palaces" "Lebanon is ours" Heading for a meltdown?

The Iraqi oud player Naseer Shamma

رحيل محمد شحرور بعد خمسة عقود من نقد جدلي للتراث

Raine "never makes clear his explanation for where modern anti-Semitism originates, what structures give rise to it, and therefore – by extension – where one should focus energy to challenge it. The very movement between anti-Semitism and Jewophobia throughout the piece captures something of this lacuna. At times, Raine seems to describe a cultural phenomenon that he feels always already exists, and is not in fact constructed and imposed. As such he describes it variously as an ‘unconscious phobia of Jews’, ‘a structure of thinking’, a form of ‘anti-political pessimism’, and as a ‘discourse’, never rooting these in anything structurally identifiable.  This leaves the reader with the impression that anti-Semitism can be explained by means of mere ideas, or via culture, rather than requiring a material explanation and history." Recentering the state

Europe and the Class Divide

Those who search for dawn do mot fear the night; nor the hand that holds the dagger

Note that the word "democracy" is not even put in inverted commas because it is a given. "The rape of India's soul"

How the West made Arabs and Berbers into races

Non-agression pact between Israel amd Gulf states

The world the Economist made

NI is part of the 6th economy in the world . "Northern Ireland currently has the worst hospital waiting lists in the UK and last month hospital waiting times reached an all-time high according to figures from Stormont's Department of Health. One in every six people in Northern Ireland is currently waiting for a first appointment with a consultant and more than 100,000 of them have been waiting for more than a year. On average, there is a four-year wait for a knee or hip operation. In emergency departments, no patient should wait more than 12 hours for treatment, but in September 2019 almost 3,500 patients waited longer."

Return to Revolution

We have to end the permanent wars

If this article is supposed to stress the contradictions of capitalism yet its progress to an ever better world, it is a mediocre attempt. Quoting Marx and Engels is meant to support the bourgeoisie's  violence, not to condemn it. Thus when the author speaks about how progress has come at a cost, he minimises the scope and depth of that cost. He could have added that the existing system with a cost is better than any alternative. The author has ignored too many negative effects from waste to exploitation, from persisting poverty to wars and proxy-wars, to creating the conditions of more wars, from stress, depression, precarity to insecurity, inequality, and stagnating wages, from monopolies to corruption, from the rise of neo-fascists, nationalism, xenophobia, racism and hate crimes, building more borders to persisting slums, oppression of women, child labour and human trafficking, from proliferation of narcissism and indifference to commodification of everything, normalising po

"No other region has documented such a long and spatially extensive drought.  Evidence points to Western industrial aerosol pollution, which cooled parts of the global ocean, thereby altering the monsoon system, as a cause. Africa will be hardest hit by climate change, but has contributed the least to causing that change." — Richard Washington, the BBC , 15 December 2019 "Development" of some at the expense of others. Recommended reading Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis

ليس للكردي إلا الريح

"Reasons to hope and why euthanasia should be legalised: 18-24-year-olds: Lab: 57 per cent/ Tories 19 per cent 25-31 olds: Labour 45 percent/Tories 30 percent 45--54-year-olds: Tories 45 percent/ Labour 35 percent 60 and above: Tories:62 percent/ Labour 18 percent." —Tariq Ali, 14 December 2019

Where children "want to die" Let's get "Brexit done" before they die.

Call climate change what it is : violence

Land and the rentier economy

Bernie Sanders' campaign

The world's biggest gated community

The women rising up on Baghdad's walls

Bernie Sanders is "a critic" of US imperialism. Elizabeth Warren is not.

"Get Brexit done" has won! Related: The UK is more regionally divided than any comparable advanced economy. Our analysis finds stark regional differences in productivity, income, unemployment, health and politics. We are not the only country to have regional divides, but our regional inequalities in productivity, income and health are far worse than in any comparable country.  

Britain as Conservative and imperialist country, and a pioneer of an aggressive form of capitalism. Even Le Monde Diplomatique doesn't include Britain's foreign policy of the contending parties! UK's austerity elections

The oppressive state is a macho rapist

Making the AUC in the image of the US foreign policy

"The expropriators constitute a tiny percentage of the population, and they control what happens with that surplus value. It is this relationship of production, Wolff insists, that has thwarted the democratic promises of the American, French, and other bourgeois revolutions. And this system of minority rule over ownership of assets and people’s labour power is also the cause of the staggering inequality that afflicts the world now." Understanding socialism Related: The works of Eric Olin Wright

"As fledgling postcolonial states committed to the Palestinian issue, the two countries had a just cause and a sound aspiration to prosperous independence. But beyond brute patriarchal force – a force embodied in the stinginess and cruelty of Deeb’s maternal grandfather – they had no way of articulating either. Moral certainty made them impotent, the film implies, and so they ended up hurting their own citizens more than the enemy."

Imperialism and internationalism

"A key aspect of the current crisis—one which is regularly understated, if not  effaced  entirely—is the complicity of those of us residing in the global North in the collective punishment of over 81 million Iranians through and by means of one of the most comprehensive and unrelenting sanctions regimes in modern history." An interjection on the Western left's response to the recent protests in Iran

It was a bloodbath in Iran, but why should you care?

Class Struggle in France

"The grievances that drove 2011 uprisings never went away." The BBC way of reporting

Conservative women reflect a conservative country "since Momentum joined Labour, I find it a hostile party for moderates.” It has been the so-called moderates who took Britain to war, privatised almost everything, incressed inequality, imposed tuition fees, ignored the City's corruption, bonused the banks despite the plunder and blunder, selling arms to autocratic friends, created a housing crisis ...imposed austerity ...

"Whereas immigration controls are usually about stopping people entering a country illegally, the new imperialism requires African nations to prevent people leaving their territory if they might be coming to Europe. It’s the 21st century’s version of the Berlin Wall slung across the African continent." Europe's plan is working

Edward Luce, a leading Financial Times columnist and author of Retreat of Western Liberalism : ‘It was remarkably arrogant to believe the rest of the world would passively adopt our script’ after 1989, Luce writes. ‘Those who still believe in the inevitable triumph of the Western model might ask themselves whether it is faith, rather than facts, that fuels their worldview. We must cast a sceptical eye on what we have learned never to question.’ "The basis of Western democracy’s flourishing in the Atlantic world after 1945 was not ‘Western values’, but rising living standards and economic growth. Yet unstoppable economic processes—automation; the age of convergence with China and the rest—will put relentless pressure  on  wage-earners in the years ahead. Globally, Washington’s credentials as the world’s sheriff have been badly damaged by Bush’s pre-emptive wars and are now being trashed by Trump; a declining us is at risk of insecure over-reaction to the rise of China. But it wo

There is is a God. It is called profit and competitive market that determine our life. At times it is called restructing and capital destruction capitalism needs for a "brighter future." Related: "Social progress"  means the more we develop technological means and the more we produce, the harder our life gets.

"Toby Dodge, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics and a longtime researcher on Iraq, said the post-2003 system which embedded corruption in the Iraqi state, as well as sectarianism and coercion, was starting to break down – and violence was spiralling as a result. " Oh, but I thought, or I have been told by the media since the invasion of Iraq and the the war in Syria, that sectarianism is inherent and the main issue and that it goes back to post-Mohammed era. Now someone is blaming an imperialist occupation and (re)engineering of the Iraqi society. And a "revolution" is unfolding, i.e. class and social issues have become prevelant.

It looks a must-read book Liberalism at Large The World According to the Economist