Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Armenian Genocide The War also brought full-scale genocide. The mass murders of Armenians by Turks in 1915 should not be thought of being marginal to Europe, committed amid a backward or ‘barbarous’ Islamic civilization. They were committed by a modernizing secular state, still a major player in European power-politics, committed to the most advanced European ideals. Thus I will address it at some length. [My italics N.M.] The death-toll was somewhere over one million, fifty to seventy per cent of all Armenians in the Turkish lands.14 If this was slightly lower than the Jewish loss-rate in the ‘Final Solution’, this was mainly because more Armenians could flee into neutral countries—350,000 of them managing to reach Europe, the biggest group of refugees during the war. The genocidal decision was taken by the Committee of Unity and Progress (CUP), the highest level of the Ittihadist (Young Turk) government. The orders were transmitted through reliable Ittihadist Governors and army grou...

As ‘a ceasefire’ has been reached, here is a genocidal view on why it shouldn’t happen and why state terrorism should continue. “The IDF concurs that fighting against Hamas will resume in the foreseeable future. Hamas will not be disarmed, remaining a persistent threat that must be addressed. Even if combat initially remains aerial after Phase II of the hostage deal, a military foothold will persist. Forces will operate in a reinforced buffer zone, which will serve as a launchpad for raids deeper into Gaza when needed—and such operations will be necessary .” I do think that Israeli violence with its different forms by the state and the settlers will continue in the form of war or in other means for the simple reason that Israel has not achieved its ‘stragetical objectives’.

What does U.S. press coverage look like in a time of genocide?

Written in the immediate aftermath of WWII. I think some arguments/theses are still relevant in tackling a complex and broad subject such as nationalism. Whether in India, US, Israel, England, Germany or Russia the worst features of nationalism are there – more or less and in different degrees. ********* ‘Patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige,  not  for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality. The nationalist does not go on the principle of simply ganging up with the strongest side. On the contrary, having picked his side, he persuades himself that it  is the stronge...

In the ‘New World’ “deliberate genocidal bursts were more common among British than Spanish or Portuguese settlers. In both cases, we find that the stronger the democracy among the perpetrators, the greater the genocide.” The organic nationalists such the young Austrians argued for an organic conception of the people and state. Conflict – be it conflict of interet or class conflict – was to be transcended, for the people are indivisible and united.  Thus “late-nineteenth-century minorities in the East came under increasing pressure, leading through induced to coerced assimilation and thence to coerced emigration. Jews took the brunt of the pressure “During the nineteenth century, every Ottoman Turkish defeat in Europe resulted in mass flight and many killings of Muslims.” Settlers and Their Victims I note two persistent features of the colonial dark side. First, the settlers often enjoyed de facto local self-rule—whatever the constitution said. For the period, these were distinctly...

Michael Mann, 1999 Read an introduction here If the people or nation is conceived of as being internally stratified, then the state’s main role is to mediate and conciliate amongst its competing interest groups. Such a state preserves diversity among its citizen body and so is relatively unlikely to encourage ethnic and political cleansing among it. Yet, if the people or nation is conceived of as organic, as ‘a perfect union, one and inseparable’ (as in ‘The American Creed’), then some leaders and movements may be tempted to seek to enhance the ‘purity’ of the organic people or nation by suppressing the real-world diversity of its seeming members. Indeed, many modern régimes which claim to be democratic have exhibited a pronounced tendency toward ethnic and political cleansing. We must distinguish between different types and degrees of ‘cleansing’, and we must clearly state that most do not approach genocide. The mildest types have been the most common. They are induced assimilation, i...

Gideon’s liberal take on Trump falls within filtering and selective reading of history by making Trump look like an abnormal and an unprecedented product of the American society. Fundamentalist liberals are in the defensive because people like Trump upsets their staus quo and their own way of ‘democratic genocidal killings’, destruction of nature, plunder, capital accumulation, massive inequality, economic domination, demonising the Other, commodification of everything … Trumps upsets liberals because his barbarism might outdo theirs. It is another belief system that a guru like Martin Wolf, another FT columnist, keeps defending what he calls ‘the free market democracy’. No, Gideon. The US has been a rogue state for decades. Even if someone has only heard of the victims of its wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and its support of the genocidal Israeli regime would be able to question why only now the term rogue is being used.  Back in 2000 William Blum had already mapped why the US is a rog...

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Islamic historian and Arab linguist

Alice is superior than Marine and Georgia

Michael Mann, 1999 The twentieth century’s death-toll through genocide is somewhere over sixty million and still rising. Yet most scholars and laypersons alike have preferred to focus on more salubrious topics. If they think about genocide at all, they view it as an unfortunate interruption of the real structural tendencies of the twentieth century—economic, social and political progress. Murderous ethnic and political cleansing is seen as a regression to the primitive—essentially antimodern—and is committed by backward or marginal groups manipulated by clever and dangerous politicians. Blame the politicians, the sadists, the terrible Serbs (or Croats) or the primitive Hutus (or Tutsis)—for their actions have little to do with us. An alternative view—often derived from a religious perspective—sees the capacity for evil as a universal attribute of human beings, whether ‘civilized’ or not. This is true, yet capacity for evil only becomes actualized in certain circumstances, and, in the c...

In the eyes of the contemporary bourgeoisie everything is admirable which dispels the idea of violence. Our middle class desire to die in peace – after them the deluge. —Geroges Sorel, Reflections on Violence , 1908.

“In the book, Grace Blakeley takes on the world’s most powerful corporations by showing how the causes of our modern crises are the result of the economic system we have built – ‘a toxic melding of public and private power’. It’s not a broken system; it’s working exactly as planned. It can’t be fixed. It must be replaced. From Amazon’s attack on employee wages through its domination of regional economies, to how Boeing flies in the face of free markets despite its 737 Max disasters, and from the likes of Henry Ford to Margaret Thatcher,  Blakeley considers the past and present of our current crises  to pinpoint exactly how it all went wrong.”  “The 30-year-old describes her book as a critique of modern capitalism from a Marxist perspective, which isn’t a phrase that major writers on the left tend to attach to themselves these days. Instead of reduced taxation, the Office for National Statistics is forecasting that by 2027-28 the UK will have the highest level of...