Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

I won't miss waiting for the next financial disaster because we haven't dealt with the underlying causes of the last one. Nor will I be disappointed not to experience the results of the proto-fascism that's rearing its grisly head right now. It's the utter idiocy, the sheer wrong-headedness of the response that beggars belief. I mean, your society's broken, so who should we blame? Should we blame the rich, powerful people who caused it? No let's blame the people with no power and no money and these immigrants who don't even have the vote, yeah it must be their fucking fault. So I might escape having to witness even greater catastrophe. — Iain Banks , Scottish author (1954-2013)

'Women were grabbed and dragged away like sacks' 

A new website, dedicated to research and data on inequality and core-periphery dynamics in the world-system

'Zionism and its destiny ’

July 4th  marks the 249th anniversary of the declaration of America's independence. This is no reason to celebrate. Let it instead serve as an opportunity to remind ourselves that the most pressing threat to humanity is a bloodthirsty pack of private interests hellbent on resource extraction and willing to use the full extent of its military might to destroy every living thing between it and capital accumulation.

Fuelling the machinery of genocide

Not really news, but good to see it on the BBC “The Yoorrook Justice Commission found violence and disease reduced the local Indigenous population by three quarters in the 20 years after the state was colonised, in the early 1830s.”

“Israel is not after solving its nuclear dilemma with Iran. It is after solving its Iran dilemma, which is that this state is too big, it’s too powerful, it’s too influential, it’s too capable .”

The world clearly constitutes a single system, i.e., a coherent whole, but the knowledge of this system presupposes knowledge of all nature and history, which man will never attain. Hence, he who makes systems must fill in the countless gaps with figments of his own imagination, i.e., engage in irrational fancies, ideologize.  —Frederick Engels, Anti-Dühring, 1969 [1877]

“The reasons for this devastation lie in structural factors shaping the country’s economy and demography , as well as the accumulated harms caused by decades of intermittent war. “The extreme underdevelopment in peripheral regions has logically bred grievances among local populations that, when combined with the central state’s violent suppression of dissent, creates fertile ground for the rise of armed groups. The atrocities committed by the RSF, SAF, and allied militias on both sides merely continue long-established patterns of violence.

“On one hand, we have the symbolic violence of intellectual gatekeeping, where certain voices—usually elite, often Western—decide which suffering is legitimate and which resistance is ‘too Western’, ‘too liberal’, or ‘not authentic enough’. On the other, we have the remnants of Orientalism living on in reverse: an unwillingness to confront tyranny when it wears traditional clothes or speaks the language of anti-imperialism. “Bourdieu showed us how elites define what counts as legitimate knowledge. Said exposed how empire produces false knowledge in order to rule. But what neither could have fully foreseen is this third form: where knowledge cloaked in anti-imperialist jargon becomes a tool to delegitimize resistance .” Here is an example: Tariq Ali cannot being himself to go beyond 'geopolitics' to sociology . There is not a single mention of the Iranian society, power relations, repression, etc., and how all that is related to 'geopolitics'. 

What response is possible for society when politics has been erased? Today, Iran is trapped between two silences —the one forced from within by the regime, and the one from outside, as the world turns away from what’s happening.”

An interview with Vivek Chibber

The Guardian's liberal view on Palestine Action

According to Al-Jazeera

Makers face human trafficking trial

Our talent for division, for seeing the parts, is of staggering importance — second only to our capacity to transcend it, in order to see the whole.  —Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, 2012

NYT, 19 June 2025