NM's blog

Author says she is ‘disgusted’ by claim from jury president Wim Wenders that film-makers should remain apolitical .

“It is impossible to understand Trumpism if we detach it from the past, as some are tempted to do when they contrast the good-old multilateral neoliberalism, which supposedly respected the international order, with a bad new nationalist and imperialist capitalism that does not. “Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney may well make the finest of speeches in Davos, but he cannot make us forget that the cause he has defended and continues to defend is not as pure as he would have us believe. “Neofascism serves as its bridgehead and model. The aim is clear and unapologetic: to destroy democratic institutions, even in the most minimal sense of the word ‘democracy’, in all countries, starting with the national sphere. “The Trump administration is an administration at war. It makes no secret of the fact that it is waging a total war against both internal and external enemies. This is its very justification. Today, as in the past, the enemy is primarily foreigners, who are equated with criminals....

Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions. —Primo Levi was an Italian Jew from Turin and a survivor of Auschwitz. His writings made him one of the most powerful literary witnesses to the Holocaust and its lasting horrors.

The global value chains and 'the hidden abode of production'

“Peterson situates the  Algerian War  not as a tragic aberration or a final spasm of colonial violence, but as a formative moment in global military thinking . “The doctrines that emerged from Algeria did not end with the  French defeat  in 1962.  They travelled outward, shaping how western militaries understood insurgency, stability, and governance across the Cold War world and beyond.”

Those who participate in this spectacle seek mass violence “to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology .” Distracted and desensitized, they seek, that is, to compensate for profound disembodiment and the loss of meaningful, authentic experience.

“Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn't trust the evidence of one's eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mission civilisatrice.”

“Anger directed at high levels of economic corruption and mismanagement in the regime often target the  aghazadeh , a pejorative used to describe children of the elite accused of amassing great wealth thanks to the political connections of their relatives.”

The achievements, the limits and the contradictions of Chavez’s government in an analysis from 2016. 

An in-depth analysis Rethinking anti-imperialist politics in the Middle East

An obituary by Joseh Fahim Note: Fahim calls Egypt under Nasser socialist (!!) Related The Egyptian novel in the sixties

By Richard Seymour Patreon , 29 January 2026 You want to break the regime's ICE offensive? Get [Stephen] Miller. "This, briefly, is a lifelong political obsession for Miller. He is now back in the White House with general authority extending well beyond Homeland Security. He lobbied for Trump to invoke the Alien Enemies Act and for a massive funding surge for ICE. The use of the Alien Enemies Act, declaring migration an invasion, has long been a strategic goal of white supremacists. And for Miller it comes with the crucial benefit that, for the right, this gives the executive practically unlimited power to deal with the crisis. Miller has claimed that Trump has ‘plenary authority’, meaning his authority is practically limitless. The idea of using paramilitary force, organised as anti-immigration enforcement, to attack the left, comes from Miller. Even the propaganda themes, blitzing the press with endless garish examples of immigrant venality and criminality, and the fascinati...

Dutch police assaulted two muslim women, hitting one with baton and kicking the other in the stomach outside a shopping center in Utrecht on January 26. Via TRT World

“Deep political-economic transformations created the context for the events of this month …” What is  their meaning for the future of the Iranian regime? “Roiled from within and menaced from without, what are its chances of survival?”

It's only terrorism if they do it to us. When we do much worse to them, it's not terrorism. ― Noam Chomsky,  Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propagand a

A senior correspondent with a degree in Politics and History.  American power, unilateralism, interventions…,but nothing about the global capitalist economy in the last 40 years or so and the social reconfigurations in the US and the world. The most Little could say in passing: “ In any age of economic stagnation and extremes of inequality, popular trust in democratic institutions corrodes …” Words like economy and China do not feature even once. The innocent liberals are in denial. Robert Brenner and Dylan Riley: The current form of capitalist democracy, characterized by regular universal-suffrage elections and the alternation in power of competing parties of government, was largely an achievement of the post-war epoch. If the cataclysm of the First World War largely destroyed the  ancien régime  in Europe, it was the Second that opened the way to universal suffrage, under American military predominance, and at least began the process of unravelling Jim Crow in the...

Creative destruction? 'Capitalist development' on the blood and bones of Palestinians Palestinian-American writer Susan Abulhawa said that plan sought to “erase Gaza's indigenous character, turn what remains of her people into a cheap labour force to manage their ‘industrial zones’ and create an exclusive coastline for ‘tourism’.” “The indigenous traditions and social fabric of this land will be obliterated utterly,” she   said  on X. Saudi Arabia has been doing it at home.  'The freedom fighter' Zelensky has not accept Kushner's invitation to a coming not out of principle, but because Putin too is invited. The UK has expressed the same reaction.

A philosophical question?