Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Free yourselves from the indoctrination presented to you as innate knowledge. My generation lived through war and fascism. Through this experience, we reached the conclusion that there should never be war again. My generation experienced fascism, which at first we accepted. We didn’t know about what was going on in the concentration camps — there were no Jews in my Pomeranian village, and we didn’t know what was happening to Jewish people. These were all realizations that I had to come to later. It was then that I came to the conclusion that this fascism — which was, of course, also an outgrowth from humanity — had an economic base supporting it. Where did the cannons come from, who built the bombers, who desired this? And who is alive today and profiting from war? Where do new developments come from? Anyone sitting in their car today with their sat nav should be aware that this is a by-product of the production of weapons for war. So, the only advice I can give is to critically questi

Ideological affinities and a long intellectual history lie behind the curious reverence for the Syrian dictator among fascists and white nationalists Related Syria and the ‘anti-imperialism’ of fools

A communist life

“Liberalism’s  dogged insistence on nonviolence  and other manifestations of bourgeois respectability further falsely render antifascist self-defense and anti-colonial rebellion indistinguishable from fascist and imperialist belligerence, implicitly (or explicitly) condoning the state and para-state violence that typifies the latter.”

The book still speaks about today’s America

This book [ Genocide in Libya ] is not meant to be conclusive, but to bring out Libya and Libya’s brutal, genocidal colonial history. And to get rid of that common and really absurd way of thinking that goes “I don’t know anything about Libya, so I’m going to talk about tribalism, I’m going to talk about [Muammar] al-Qaddafi, about regionalism or religion.” Who doesn’t have regions? Who doesn’t have these social complexities? An interview with Ali Abdullatif Ahmida Related There was no a Nuremberg trials for Italian fascists

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

The forgotten Arab Republicans

  The Great Transformation and the Countermovement to Capitalism

  Is it possible to stop people from becoming fascists?

How Winston Churchill and the British government attacked the Greek Resistance and sowed the seeds of civil war

  Why can’t Britain handle the truth about Winston Churchill?

" Men  make  their  own history, but they do  not  make it as they please; they do  not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from  the  past." Almost the complete opposite of fascism

 Partners in Crime

Anti-communism without communism, demonising the Left and appeasing the far-right. The End of Anti-Fascism Related European identity and the paradox of anti-communism Instructions not to use anti-capitalist materials in schools

“It would be useful for some contemporary pundits and politicians to be reminded that ‘horseshoe theory’, which places anti-fascist activity in the same category as the fascists they oppose, is dangerous nonsense.”  A book review The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War

 Written by Vasily Grossman in 1959 Anti-Semitism can take many forms – from a mocking, contemptuous ill-will to murderous pogroms. Anti-Semitism can be met with in the market and in the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences, in the soul of an old man and in the games children play in the yard. Anti-Semitism has been as strong in the age of atomic reactors and computers as in the age of oil-lamps, sailing-boats and spinning-wheels. Anti-Semitism is always a means rather than an end; it is a measure of the contradictions yet to be resolved. It is a mirror for the failings of individuals, social structures and State systems. Tell me what you accuse the Jews of – I'll tell you what you're guilty of. Even Oleinichuk, the peasant fighter for freedom who was imprisoned in Schlusselburg, somehow expressed his hatred for serfdom as a hatred for Poles and Yids. Even a genius like Dostoyevsky saw a Jewish usurer where he should have seen the pitiless eyes of a Russian serf-owner, industri

 The Authoritarian Personality

 Very engaging! “I  think that Benjamin has never been as relevant to questions of politics as he is today with the exception of his own lifetime. As I read him, Benjamin offers one of the best explanations both for the ongoing resilience of capitalism, despite all of its predations and all the instability that it creates, as well as the connection between fascism and liberalism that we are seeing being expressed today. He also offers, I think, the best way to understand how to address our contemporary moment and how to resist and upend capitalism, liberalism, and fascism all round.” Histories of Violence: Why We Should All Read Walter Benjamin Today

The century of Einstein and Planck was also the century of Hitler. The Gestapo and the scientific renaissance were children of the same age. How humane the nineteenth century seemed, that century of naive physics, when compared with the twentieth century, the century that had killed his* mother. There is a terrible similarity between the principles of Fascism and those of contemporary physics. Fascism has rejected the concept of a separate individuality, the concept of 'a man', and operates only with vast aggregates. Contemporary physics speaks of the greater or lesser probability of occurrences within this or that aggregate of individual particles. And are not the terrible mechanics of Fascism founded on the principle of quantum politics, of political probability? Fascism arrived at the idea of the liquidation of entire strata of the population, of entire nations and races, on the grounds that there was a greater probability of overt or covert opposition among these