NM's blog

Excerpts from an article by Adam Hanieh on the FT “The new high-yielding varieties of the Green Revolution, by contrast, could only deliver their promised output through large and repeated applications of industrial fertilisers, especially nitrogen-based products such as urea and ammonium nitrate. Since many of these fertilisers are derived from natural gas, the Green Revolution meant that the world’s food production became ever more closely tied to a constantly increasing supply of hydrocarbon inputs.  “Doubts have long been expressed about the sustainability of this fossil fuel-based food system. But as oil and gas prices have risen steeply amid the US-Israeli war on Iran and a significant part of the global fertiliser trade has been brought to a standstill, its potential vulnerabilities have been made clear. “The current moment differs from those earlier crises in one crucial respect. During the past two decades, Gulf monarchies such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Em...

Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West

A very good piece by Eyal Weizman .  I first knew Weizman when I read his 2007 book Hollow Land . Weizman is director of  Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London “The circular logic of Zionist settler-colonialism: settlements are built to mark and protect the state’s border, but that makes them vulnerable to attack and so a buffer zone is established to protect them. Afterwards, this buffer zone is itself settled to mark and protect the newly expanded borders, at which point another buffer zone becomes necessary. In this manner vulnerability is produced and then mobilised in a feedback loop that the genocide scholar A. Dirk Moses has called ‘permanent security’. “The image of luxury towers constructed above mass graves, with tens of thousands presumably buried under the earthworks, embodies the logic of 21 st -century genocide. The Israeli government now hopes, in the words of the former minister Ron Dermer, that what ‘two years of war did not accomplish will...

Reading on screens or on paper

“Iran is not a country defined under NATO’s security umbrella, not an economy absorbed into a single bloc, and not a state whose path in a moment of crisis can be determined by the order of one foreign power. But at the same time…Iran does not have the economic power of China or the United States, their global alliance networks, or their institutional power to shape the rules of the world order.” It is “a regional power in an in-between place, trying to preserve a degree of independence without being able to become a global hegemon. “The US-Israeli attack and Iran’s response revealed this in-between position more clearly than anything else.”

Look who is the biggest threat to the UK. An elderly woman was manhandled by officers yesterday [13 April] because she was unable to walk quickly enough or far enough following her arrest under the UK Terrorism Act. Onlookers pleaded to the police to “leave her be” as they witnessed the insanity of arresting her. Over 500 people were arrested under the Terrorism Act at this single event, bringing the total arrests under the Lift The Ban campaign to well over 3,000 since July. Raj Chada, Head of Criminal Defence at leading law firm Hodge Jones and Allen, has confirmed: “The most common terrorist in the UK at present is a pensioner at a silent vigil holding a placard. That should be a matter of shame for the UK authorities.”

The term “ is being picked up again now to justify the latest western onslaught in the Middle East .” 

“More on the crisis of liberal expertise. This exchange over Yuri Slezkine's review on the "Western civilization" is a good illustration of how some scholars of Ukraine have managed to miss not only what has happened in the world since 2022 — saying without irony that the West offers an alternative to Russian barbarism in Ukraine, after Gaza and Iran, is simply nauseating — but also the developments within Ukraine itself (or perhaps still strategically obfuscating them). Slezkine's response at the end, on why Ukraine is an ethnonationalist state, is very strong.” —Volodymyr Eshchenko’s comment on Why ‘the West’?

‘Power without a throne’ There is mention, for example, of  Macron's government support of Haftar .

Published in 1967, Guy Debord’s analysis of the society of the spectacle posited that lived reality had “receded into a representation.” In its “concrete manufacture of alienation,” Debord contended, the spectacle obscured social contradictions. But the reproduction of society without consent now involves the formation of a “hyperspectacle”: the reality of contradiction itself becomes an image, a domineering abstract presence; the commodity’s colonization of life is such that it now extends to social contradiction itself. The more we observe Trump’s abstract spectacle of contradiction, the more we struggle to understand the concrete contradiction that has produced it. Amid intensifying alienation, the Trump administration pursues a new geostrategy. —  Juliano Fiori ,   February 19, 2026

“I talk in the book about the special kind of sado-masochism it takes to spend six years reading alarmist literature that imagines people like me to be a genetic nightmare and cultural failure. Yet I find the complexes and psychoses that afflict white supremacists as they contemplate Eurabians both interesting and funny, if I can use that word about something so serious. You never know when porn studies methodology will come in handy, but it does again and again: literature that imagines the Great Replacement can most easily be likened to a snuff film, in which erotic pleasure occurs at the death of the Other. This is why I talk in the book about the erotics of ethnic horror, a literary genre that best fits Great Replacement literature.” Description Interview and excerpt 

Both conservative and liberal economists, in other words, continue to frame economics the way Lionel Robbins defined it, as the allocation of scarce resources among competing ends, which has rightfully earned the discipline the description of being the dismal science. For both schools, efficiency remains the prime consideration. Rather, the economic  problematique  should be, according to Deaton, the way his fellow Cambridge economist Keynes defined it: “how to combine three things: economic efficiency, social justice, and individual liberty.”

 From the mouth of  a former CIA operative – someone who in principle defends the criminal action of US imperialism, inverting the reality of who is the real culprit and the real threat . His only concern is how a crime should be committed. Related Why Iran is not Venezuela

“The real strength of Darolshafa’s text is that it shows the main divide in Iran is not simply about who supports the Islamic Republic and who opposes it. The deeper issue is a struggle over the meaning of change itself. For the first people, survival comes first. For the second, the fall of the regime at any cost. For the third, a secular and legal transition. And for the fourth, social revolution. “This is not just a disagreement over tactics. Each of these projects produces its own people and speaks in their name. One calls on the “Nation of Imam Hussein.” Another invokes the “Nation of the Lion and Sun.” The third speaks of the “Iranian nation” or “the people of Iran.” And the fourth speaks of the working class and the oppressed. The conflict is not really over words. It is over hegemony. It is about which force gets to present itself as the true political voice of society.” A good summary

Just another Brit attacking a whole religion and all Muslims for the actions of a tiny minority. Another Brit who is now 'intellectually' not different from the far-right neo-fascists. Another Brit who has planned a show in Israel, i.e. unashamedly being complicit in the genocidal war. Another leaning far right Brit who quotes from the Quran without historical or present context.  Related As Brooke Ivey Johnson put it on the Metro , “ There is something uniquely deflating about watching a figure once synonymous with sharp, absurdist brilliance slip into reactionary cliché…   Watching him railing against imaginary enemies online, you can’t help but feel that what’s really being lost isn’t ‘Englishness’, but perspective. ”  British historian Simon Schama needs a history lesson

The media manufactures discursive cover, lawfare groups weaponise legal frameworks, institutions enforce discipline, police stage public spectacles of sovereign power, and so on. This division of labour allows repression to appear diffuse, uncoordinated, even spontaneous. Yet the cumulative effect is systematic and constitutes a multi-sited assault that targets solidarity from every direction while granting each actor plausible deniability. No single institution bears full responsibility; no single hand is seen to strike the blow. This insulates each node from legal liability, public outrage, and reputational damage, allowing institutions to maintain their liberal self-images while participating in illiberal outcomes. — European Legal Support Centre ,  The Multi-Sited Repression of  Palestine Solidarity in Britain,  2026, p. 30.

The Alibi of Capital

A review of Adam Hanieh’s A. Crude capitalism : Oil, corporate power, and the making of the world market

“The Minab case was no longer just a military case. It developed three layers. The first was technical and legal: was a school wrongly included in a military target package? The second was political: who, in those first days, denied responsibility or tried to shift it elsewhere?  And the third, perhaps more important than both, was moral: how did the deaths of children stop being a red line and become something people bargained over in the battle of narratives? This report begins with that first layer, but it does not stay there . Because the story of the Minab school is also the story of the moment when war contaminates language itself.”