Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Politically and intellectually bankrupt

Europe’s longest-held political prisoner

“For decades, I asked such intellectuals and academics with pretensions of worldliness how they could only consider the Democratic or Republican Party's policies on domestic matters, which affect some 345 million Americans, versus global matters that affect eight billion people. The answer consistently boils down to the fact that both parties pursue imperialist policies around the world. Since the only variation in their programmes relates to domestic issues, it becomes necessary to vote for the ‘lesser evil’  and defend it as an absolute good to defeat the more evil.” Indeed. Even Noam Chomsky believed (probably still believes) in the ‘lesser evil’ dogma. He advocated a vote to John Kerry in 2004. Massad rightly calls such a dogma a myth and parochialism. Frantz Fanon, however, “ understood by the early 1960s that only the colonised would be able to defeat the ongoing imperial depredations visited on the globe, especially given the complicity of the white liberals and socialists o

No nation can be free if it oppresses other nations.  —  Lenin  referring to an earlier statement by Marx. “[I]t was the combined effects of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the subsequent wave of globalization, and Washington’s aggressive drive for a unipolar order that led to much more open denials of imperialism on the left. Ironically, at a time when liberals were celebrating a new naked imperialism, much of the global left jettisoned all critical notions of imperialism theory, even, in some cases, offering support for the new empire ideology.  Here the ideological hegemony exerted by capital over the Western left was on full display. [with its derivatives and distractions: identity politics, ‘democracy promotion’, ‘the threat of Islam’, ‘humanitarian intervention’, expansion of NATO, ‘it’s in their culture’, ‘saving Muslim women’, ‘we are all middle class now’, ‘human rights’, liberal feminism, celebrity culture …] “[T]he gap between the views of imperialism held by the Wester

In ‘strategic backwaters’, wrote Peter Gowan in 2001, even real genocide can be casually covered or countenanced, as the experience of Rwanda has shown. Where delinquent states are pivotal to American strategic interests, on the other hand, they are vigilantly shielded from human rights pressures, as the cases of Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey or Indonesia, to name only the most flagrant examples, have long made clear.  — Peter Gowan, Neoliberal Cosmopolitanism, New Left Review, Sep-Oct 2001.

   من غزة إلى لبنان

“By reducing the entirety of its brutal history to the singular crime of the Holocaust, Germany has failed to account for its settler-colonial  violence  against other people and, therefore, has not learnt any lesson at all. “The übermenschentum “mentality is still pervasive, though its existence is officially denied, and thus, its roots have gone unexamined. “We see a deeply-rooted settler colonial mindset in Germany's institutions and organisations that have not been confronted in a century.”

Harris or Trump will soon occupy the most violent elected office in their homeland (and the world). Trump and Harris “are destroying what is left of the democratic institutions of this country.” ‘Democratic institutions’? When were they ‘democratic’?  “ The existing two parties are identical in their genocidal militarism and backing of the Israeli settler colony, with one openly planning its  fascist takeover  of the entire country.”  The 50/60 per cent of eligible Americans who do vote “are conditioned by the commercial logic of their degenerate capitalism to choose between Coke and Pepsi, McDonald's and KFC, Nike and Reebok, Apple and Samsung, or Trump and Harris.” I have always liked Dabashi’s articles . I fear though he is sliding into repeating sentences with different words and tone.

Appearances can be deceiving Related “In the long term, the most debilitating state response to the movement may be neither the imprisonment of leadership or propaganda, but the state’s diversion of attention from social justice to development, that is, from the profound violence of the security state to the easily discussable and putatively separable matter of economic investment.” —Emilio Spadola Justice and/or development

  A liberal approach that ignores class, inequality and uneven capitalist development in the EU and the undemocratic nature of its structure and rule. “ Van Middelaar leaves little doubt of the much lower regard in which he holds the Commission, a useful but humdrum factory of rules, and the Parliament, a windy cavern of words. The Council, by contrast, is the seat of authoritative decisions. The Commission and the Parliament are given to utopian temptations of European federalism, for which he barely hides his scorn… How then does the Council reach its decisions? Behind closed doors, in deliberations of which no minutes are kept, that issue in announcements under the seal of consensus. Van Middelaar supplies a graphic, if tactful, description of the psychological and political mechanisms that generate such consensus. That it is reached far beyond any popular say in the matters so decided, in conclaves where no public gaze is admitted, is not cause for any particular complaint or cr

 From the archive The Making and Unmaking of the Greater Middle East

Even Le Monde Diplomatique calls the ‘Palestinian question’. 1. “In the past few months, conferences have been held in Israel advocating resettlement (especially of northern Gaza) as soon as the territory is ‘cleaned up.” 2. The ‘Order and Clean-up’ programme “ involves the ‘total defeat’ of Hamas, then a process of ‘deradicalisation’; the idea is that evacuating the 300,000 Palestinians still living north of the Netzarim corridor will enable the IDF to establish an unbreakable siege of Hamas in this area, and orders to this effect were issued on 6 October this year. A second stage will trap Palestinian fighters in ‘closed military zones’, forcing them to surrender or starve to death, without regard for any hostages who might be held there. This strategy is already in place at the Jabaliya camp, which has been under siege since 12 October.” 3. “On 3 July the government approved the seizure of nearly 13 sq km of land in the Jordan valley, the largest confiscation of land in the West Ban

I have put this interesting (and free book) in my reading list.

A reminder: There is no separation between the social relations inside the US and its imperialism.  “The intimate relationship between America’s internal and external wars, established by its original sin, has long been clear. The question was always how long mainstream intellectuals could continue to offer fig-leaf euphemisms for shock-and-awe racism, and suppress an entwined history of white supremacism and militarisation with fables about American exceptionalism, liberalism’s long battle with totalitarianism, and that sort of thing. *** From a critical take on the American journalist and activist Ta-Nehisi Coates “Convinced that the presumption of inequality and discrimination underpinned the making of the modern world, Du Bois placed his American experience of racial subjection in a broad international context. Remarkably, all the major black writers and activists of the Atlantic West, from C.L.R.James to Stuart Hall, followed him in this move from the local to the global. Transcen

I wish children didn’t die. I wish they would be temporarily elevated to the skies until the war ends. Then they would return home safe, and when their parents would ask them: “where were you?” they would say: “we were playing with the stars.” — Ghassan Kanafani *ليت الأطفال لا يموتون* *ليتهم يرفعون الى السماء مؤقتا* *ريثما تنتهي الحرب* *ثم يعودون الى بيوتهم آمنين !* *وحين يسألهم الاهل محتارين* *اين كنتم ؟* *يقولون فرحين* *”كنا نلعب مع النجوم “* غسان كنفاني   

_ كانت الوحدةُ الأمميةُ للعمال من أهم أفكار ماركس، وهو نفسه قد ساهم في بناء أول أممية حقيقية.... بعد قرنين نجد أن ماركس يمثل بؤرة الخلافات داخل الحركة العمالية وعامِلَ انقسام وتذرر. _ كان ماركس علامةً فارقةً في نقدِ الفلسفة، بل إنه كان قد جسد نقده ذاك عمليًا بالاتجاه نحو العلومِ الاقتصادية والتاريخية لِيُخَصِّصَ لها معظم أعْمالِهِ..... بعد قرنين يُقَدَّمُ ماركس على أنه فيلسوف وتُقَدَّمُ أعْمالَهُ على أساس أنها "الفلسفة الماركسية". _ كان الخيطُ الناظم لأبحاث ماركس هو نقدُ الاقتصاد وتعبيرته النظرية الاقتصاد السياسي، وطبعا ليس من الصدفة أن تكون جُلُّ أعْمالِهِ مُنْدَرِجة تحت عنوانٍ واحدٍ "نقدُ الاقتصادِ السياسي"...... بعد قرنين لا نعثر على ماركس إلا بصفته "رجل اقتصاد" وصاحب "نظرية اقتصادية", بل انهم يتباهون لأنهم يستحضرون ماركس لحل مشاكل الرأسمالية. _ كان ماركس قد كرس كل أعمالِهِ النظرية في سياقٍ واحدٍ ولأجل قضية واحدة هي المساهمة في النضال الثوري ضد النظام الرأسمالي، وكان هو نفسه في محطات كثيرة ومهمة مناضلا داخل تلك الحركة الثورية، وهو الذي ساهم في

Back to the origins and context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which many if not most people, only have a superficial idea about it or a distorted one. I think Volodomyr Ishchenko provides an excellent approach .

“Many of the world’s wealthiest spend hundreds of millions of dollars to help their preferred candidate win .” An election that  “is on track to be the most expensive in history.”

“Over the last eight years, but especially during the Biden administration, core aspects of Trumpism have been institutionalised. Let’s take a look at the record. First, the ‘China problem’ identified by Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro, became a bipartisan obsession. It is now hegemonic to the extent that Harris attacked Trump from the right on this issue during their debate, condemning him for having ‘sold us out’ by selling chips to China. (He, in fact, limited sales of chips to China.) Second, economic nationalism – including protectionism, stimulus and a domestic industrial policy – was embraced far more vigorously by Biden than Trump. Ironically, he was enabled in this by pressure from the Sanders left, just as Trump was inhibited by pressure from the Republican right. Third, the far right’s borders agenda has been adopted uncontested, and now forms a major plank in Harris’s platform. Fourth, in all essential ways, Biden adopted Trump’s foreign policy. The withdrawal from Afghanist