Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The Myth of "Populism"

In August 2011 the Syrian regime’s tanks occupied the city centre of Hama after a month-long siege which claimed the lives of more than 200 civilians. This is the famous revolutionary song  Get Out Bashar,   sung by thousands in mass protests  at the heart of Hama weeks before the tanks rolled in and still popular today. The other videos remind us of how it all was before the counterrevolution (with its internal and external forces) took over. (This subtitled version is not the full version)

Sayyid Qutb was a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s and 1960s until his execution by Nasser. He was born "to a smallholding family on the outskirts of Asyut in Upper Egypt. Repulsed at a young age by local clerics who failed to 'simplify religion for the public', Qutb snubbed Azhar [University] and embarked on the path of secular education. Qutb graduated to become a primary schoolteacher on 1933, and assumed a few bureaucratic posts at the Ministry of Education between 1940 and 1952. Unlike the vigorous-looking and socially engaging [Hassan] Banna, [the founder of the the Muslim Brotherhood], Qutb was plangued by poor health, always appearing pale and heavy-eyed, and leading the life of a chronically depressed introvert in the then-desolate district of Helwan, outside the capital [Cairo]. He found solace not in religion, but in literature and sensual poetry, and was quickly drawn to a circle of European-inspired intellectualls, patronized by the tow

Iran " Putin, Assad, Hezbollah and all their cheerleaders in the alt-right and Stalinist left are already trying to smear the protests as pro-imperialist. The revolt shows, once again, that Stalinism is not a dead issue in the progressive movement, and that its remaining advocates want only an authoritarian “anti-imperialist” regime to support." Good! I completely agree with that. However, Paul Mason has drawn a fair picture until he messed it up with this: "But their rhetorical support does not delegitimise the mass upsurge, nor does it mean the EU and Western democratic countries should stand back and ignore the repression." Is he appealling to the EU and Western imperialist states to do something? I don't understand these type of leftist journalists who instead of appealing to progressives, trade unions, ordinary people, they talk to the criminal states which have been pursuing criminal, hypocritical policies for their own geopolitical interests. Th

"The Cold War served as a good justification for almost any outrageous action. One could use the Cold War to justify throwing one’s grandmother under the bus." "The obvious difference between present-day populism in the United States and in Iran is that while the former is a threat to the whole planet, the latter is a detriment mostly to its own people." " Economists began predicting the imminent demise of the regime almost as soon as it was installed in February 1979. The main reason their predictions did not come true is precisely because the regime established a fairly comprehensive welfare state. The gradual but consistent shift to the right in recent years naturally erodes this welfare state and thereby undermines the social basis of the regime." I don't agree with the use of the word "populism". Nowadays, liberals and neoliberals use it to describe progressive and leftist movements and leaders in order to vilify and discredit them

Via Michael Roberts A new research paper reveals that over 150 years income and gains from the ownership of capital (property and financial assets) or more exactly wealth is much greater than the expansion of new value (economic growth). Thomas Piketty in his famous book of 2014, Capitalism in the 21st century,argued that if the return to capital exceeded the rate of economic growth, rentiers would accumulate wealth at a faster rate than incomes gr ow. This report confirms that for the last 150 years. The rich get richer from owning things rather than working for it. The only exceptions were in wars or in periods when the rate of profit on capital falls fast as in the 1880s, 1930s and 1970s and in the current depression. The rate of return on everything

Twenty-First Century Victorians

For those near UCLA Understanding the Middle East A conference

Sartre est effectivement resté constant dans son philo-sionisme fondamental. Peur de passer pour antisémite, sentiment de culpabilité devant l’Holocauste, refus de s’autoriser une perception en profondeur des Palestiniens comme victimes en lutte contre l’injustice d’Israël, ou quelque autre raison   ? je ne le saurai jamais. Tout ce que je sais, c’est que, dans sa vieillesse, il n’était guère différent de ce qu’il avait été jadis : la même amère source de déception pour tout Arabe, Algérien excepté, qui admirait à juste titre ses autres positions et son œuvre.  Ma rencontre avec Jean-Paul Sartre

Ahed Tamimi عهد تميمي Western governments are not interested in marketing her!

Iran update The economic problems this creates are serious. Youth unemployment stands at about 40%, more than 3 million Iranians are jobless and the prices of some basic food items, such as poultry and eggs, have recently soared by almost half. “This has started from the bottom of the society, from the less fortunate,” Reza, a Mashhad resident, said. “This is not middle-class protesting, this is lower-class demonstrating, people of the suburbs. Many are fed up with situation. (The Guardian, 31 December 2017) It looks that, unlike 2009 movement, this one is not middle-class-based protest movement.

Pyongyang's brutalist architecture Brutal, indeed.  However, a city with no  visual pollution, no  neons and commercial advertising is not a bad thing. I believe the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil, also bans commercial advertising. 

I hate New Year's Day