Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“Bonapartism has reemerged stronger than before. In Macron it assumes a classic form. The right of the Rassemblement National and the left of La France insoumise (the ‘extremes’, in the parlance of the quality press) balance one another, while the radical centre – the  bourgeois bloc  anatomized by Serge Halimi – is free to pursue its own interests, while also claiming to protect the dignity of the nation, wider humanity and now the ecosphere itself. A remarkable political formula, as [Gaetano] Mosca would have put it.” A bonapartist solution

“Rather than dividing the right from the left, migration splits both right and left formations internally. Upon gaining power, the only way for both left and right to resolve this tangle of contradictions is through hypocrisy: to adopt practices that contradict public proclamations. In reality, whoever is in government, it is always the labour market, in turn determined by relevant legislation, the business cycle and the geopolitical situation, that determines migration policies . Barbed wire

‘Israel has the right to defend itself against such heinous attacks,’ 

John Gray is considered an English philosopher.  According to the British journalist Francis Wheen, Gray “has published dozens of increasingly apocalyptic books and articles on the need to end the Enlightenment project forthwith.” Excerpts from ‘ The West yearns for Putin to fall. But what happens if the Russian state collapses?’ The New Statesman, July 28-August 17, 2023 “The West yearns for Putin to fall. But what happens if the Russian state collapses? If Ukrainian forces nonetheless fail to break through Russian positions, a frozen conflict becomes a realistic outcome. Western support is nearing exhaustion. Deindustrialised societies cannot sustain a protracted conflict when Russia is operating as a fully fledged war economy. The West is staking its endgame on regime change. What if that has the same result as it did in Iraq and Libya?” In the Russian Civil War of 1917-1921 “ Western military intervention involving British and other foreign troops exacerbated the bloodshed. As man

Why Europe clings to the colonial mindset

David Hearst.: “ Britain offered $2.7bn in arms to Ukraine and $6m in disaster relief for 23 million people in Turkey and Syria? Is this for real? Apparently yes. ” I think this is a simplistic argument, especially that Hearst does not explain the reasons. There are priorities that dictate the big powers policies, including the UK’s. And those priorities are not new and one needs to mention and explain them. Talking about ‘morality’ or ‘a moral duty’ is misleading and throwing dust in the eyes.

Source: The New Statesman  

“In the beginning, everyone we met was really helpful – and then the reality set in. I am grateful to them for saving our lives, but in this bargain, I’ve lost my dignity, my home and I’m very depressed,” says Rias. Reflecting on the racism they’ve faced in their first year in Europe

I liked the movie. In the original title ‘back’, not ‘skin’ is used.

Thirty-three years after the fall of the Berlin wall, bloc-thinking is back. The democratic “West” against the authoritarian “East”. Authoritarian alliances in the “West” recede into the backdrop, critique of liberal democracy’s chronic shadows grow silent. States recently accused of threatening democracy and the rule of law are embraced. They belong once again to the democratic “We”. With the war in Ukraine, authoritarianism in the “West” is externalized to the Putin regime. But authoritarian populism has been growing in Europe for a long time in the midst of liberal democracy, in states that claim to be illiberal, but not only there. The pandemic has intensified this neoliberal-authoritarian transformation. When uncertainties increase and bring about the compulsion to control, all sides take recourse to identitarianisms, as if there had never been a critique of it. If we want to understand democracy in a fundamentally different way — without the nation, without the people, without bl

Written after Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man and Huntington’s Class of Civilisations , but before the ‘war on terror’, the war in Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq, the rise of China, the 2008/09 Great Recession, the Arab uprisings, the rise of the far right, the Russian invasion of Ukraine. ————- Why then do the European states claim for themselves the right to spread civilization and manners to different continents? Why not to Europe itself? – Joseph Roth, 1937 “Modern democracy, like the nation-state it is so closely associated with, is basically the product of the protracted domestic and international experimentation which followed the collapse of the old European order in 1914. In the short run, both Wilson and Lenin failed to build the ‘better world’ they dreamed of. The communist revolution across Europe did not materialize, and the building of socialism was confined to the Soviet Union; the crisis of liberal democracy followed soon after as one country after an

Europe’s Twentieth Century

There will be no limit to the number of Ukrainian refugees who can live with UK host families under a new visa scheme. The UK Health Secretary: "I'm pleased that we're doing this because as a country we have a very proud record of offering sanctuary to people from wars and from conflicts, When the bus driver dropped Vishnu and his friends off, they joined a throng of hundreds of people trying to pass through a gate at the border. Vishnu says only Ukrainians were being allowed through - and each time he got close to the crossing, guards would "drag" him to the back again. Suddenly UK homes are open to host refugees, a certain type of refugees An openly racist Europe defeats most of what we claim is at stake UK Home Secretary Priti Patel: “I have developed the Ukraine family scheme following discussions with the Ukrainian government and neighbouring countries and I am proud to have launched it within a matter of days,  enabling Ukrainians with family in the Unite

Europe’s reputation as a cosmopolitan haven has been exposed as a mirage Related A bigger picture was captured by Peter Gowan more than 20 years ago: “The cosmopolitan project for unifying humanity through the agency of the dominant capitalist states—on the normative basis that we are all individual global citizens with liberal rights—will not work: it is more likely to plunge the planet into increasingly divisive turmoil.” The New Liberal Cosmopolitanism

The historian and broadcaster Michael Wood, a professor of public history at the University of Manchester, says: “Everything that is going on at the moment, it seems to me, all links together.”   History has seen great civilisations in China, India and across Eurasia, “but they’ve not caused these crises that we are living through now, and nor has the African world. “You know what happened? Roughly 500 years ago, these small, aggressive maritime powers on the shores of Europe went across the world with their technology and created their empires by sea. “And I think what we are seeing now can all be interpreted in the light of the post-imperial [age].”  Other societies may now be enthusiastic participants, but it was not they who created western industrial capitalism, he argues . Related Anti-capitalist politics

Targeting minorities, again. The European Court of Justice bans kosher and halal slaughter

India, the EU, the US, Canada and the UK are among the countries which have reserved the most doses of the vaccine, according to the latest data. It would be insane if the vaccines were to be put under a democratic health organisation that distributes the doses worldwide according to those who need them first, i.e. the frontline workers, the aged and the vulnerables. But we live in a world of nation states, capitalist competition and profit and intellectual property. And that’s the ‘rational’ and ‘natural’ order of things.

Passages to Modernity in Europe and the Middle East by Isam Al-Khafaji A good book I read last year.

One of the things that Corona has exposed The grim crisis in Europe's care homes