Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

" Nolan’s every film, from  Following  (1998) to  Dunkirk  (2017), reverses the anti-tradition of Roberto Rossellini, whom Jean-Luc Godard, in  Godard on Godard , celebrates as a great artist because he trusts chance. “To trust chance is  to hear voices ,” Godard wrote, by which he meant the voices of other people. If Christopher Nolan hears any voice, it’s Margaret Thatcher’s from 1987." Tory Porn / The Hobbesian anti-art of Christopher Nolan

Louis Proyect: "All me cynical but my take on the middle-class protests in Venezuela is that it is less interested in democracy than it is in ratcheting the Gini coefficient back towards one. I remain a committed Marxist but when it comes to Maduro versus Leopoldo Lopez, the opposition leader who was a key figure in the 2002 coup attempt, I’ll stick with Maduro—warts and all. Or I should say Boligarchs and all."  Yes, but also have to be very critical of Maduro.

"It was the deadliest single attack on a military installation in the entire 16-year history of the Afghan conflict." 170 Afghan soldiers killed. Last year a record number of Afghan forces were killed - 6,800 in total. That is three times the losses of American forces during the entire 16 years of this conflict."  — the BBC website

Nicely put. "That, however, was only part of the story. There are those who see modern history as an enthralling tale of progress, and those who view it as one long nightmare. Marx, with his usual perversity, thought it was both. Every advance in civilization had brought with it new possibilities of barbarism. The great slogans of the middle-class revolution—"Liberty, Equality, Fraternity"—were his watchwords, too. He simply inquired why those ideas could never be put into practice witho ut violence, poverty, and exploitation. Capitalism had developed human powers and capacities beyond all previous measure. Yet it had not used those capacities to set men and women free of fruitless toil. On the contrary, it had forced them to labor harder than ever. The richest civilizations on earth sweated every bit as hard as their Neolithic ancestors."

       حدوتة مصرية 

The British Empire's hidden history is one of resistance, not pride Further reading The History Thieves: Secrets, Lies and the Shaping of a Modern Nation by Ian Cobain and In the 1950s, the distinguished American sociologist Edward Shils decided that the explanation lay with a ruling class that was “unequalled in secretiveness and taciturnity”, whose members were so close and comfortable with one another that they had little fear of hidden secrets. Cobain largely supports this view. Class deference combined with a relatively benign and trusting view of the state’s behaviour may explain “why the peculiarly uncommunicative nature of the British state does not provoke greater resentment and unease among the British public and media”.  Quoted by Ian Jack, the Guardian

War is here: The Lebanese political elites unite again

I cannot disclose who said the following, but the arguments about the US and British armies today sound very interesting. "The peasants [of the Russian army prior 1917] in uniform weren't mercenaries, but conscripts. The US and British soldiers [today] aren't conscripts, not the historical equivalent of the Russian imperial army, but the historical equivalent of Hessians or the Swiss guard. There's a huge difference between those two. Only a conscript is a worker in uniform - all the others are bourgeois cops with bigger or smaller guns. Edit: I can't find any historical example where a revolution was won with the aid of professional soldiers - it was always won by defeating them, be they Hessians, the Swiss Guard or Cossacks...and some US soldiers are OK and have resisted imperialism - still doesn't change the US military's role as a whole... I never said a soldier "can't act in favour of the masses because he wasn't conscr

A historian with an Islamophobic approach and poor historiography, and a journalist with good arguments, but a partial take.  Lacking in Osborne's perpective is violence in historical "Islam". There is no "Islam, religion of peace" or violent "Islam". There is historical Islam with both peace and violence like historical Christianity, Hinduism, "capitalist democracy", etc. "No, Channel 4: Islam is not responsible for the Islamic State"

"When Russia is involved in a strategically important conflict, RT becomes a tool of war communication, as CNN did for the US during the Iraq war. It then turns into a willing international conduit for the official version of events. In Syria, where RT has often given a platform to Bashar al-Assad, the outcome of the battle of Aleppo crystallised the deep antagonism of the war of information between Russia and the West: after the Syrian army retook the city, RT showed people celebrating in west Aleppo, while most of western media focused on the humanitarian situation in the eastern districts (see Hélène Richard,  Covering Aleppo ). RT invited a former British diplomat to comment on the ‘inevitable civilian losses’ during the liberation of Mosul by US-backed Iraqi forces." "RT, Russia's Voice to the World"

One more confirmation that the US imperialist, criminal regime has never planned a 'regime change' in Syria. First it called for "a Syrian regime without al-Assad, then gave limited support to the rebels, which could not even defend itself against the killing machine of the Syrian regime and its Russian backers. 

"Does Nicola Sturgeon really want to break with centuries of Scottish tradition by standing with the oppressor and backing an apartheid regime which is hell-bent on the oppression of Palestinians through a brutal military occupation in the Gaza Strip, West Bank and East Jerusalem?" Scotland's First Minister backs Israel's dark arts

This was written before the wiping out of UK Independent Party, for example, but a lot of it is still relevant if you add the future water wars and environmental disasters. The coming global civil war: Is there a way out?