NM's blog

and the crisis of international solidarity

A very good analysis and approach. The big picture and the continuum.  “There is no consensus among liberals that war against Iran is undesirable. “American wars in the Middle East, including its role in the genocide in Gaza and the campaigns against Lebanon, are also not just projections of power or solely a reflection of long-standing strategic interests that merge with cultural zeitgeist. They are also generative and reproductive of American political power  and  capital .”

A very brief summary as a reply to one of the common comments. Comment: “you get what you vote for. can't recall a single example in trump's long fat life where he ever cleaned up one of his many messes.” Harperium My reply: Does that mean had more Americans voted for a different contender, Biden or Harris, things would have been different? You are ignoring Israel's influence and that both Biden and Harris supported a genocidal war on the Palestinians. You ignore that the situation has to be contextualised within the political-economy of the US vis-a-vis China and how the US is trying to regain its capitalist hegemony by weakening China. Both Venezuela and Iran are two proxies. And the more the US declines, the more violent it becomes.

'Changing regime behaviour rather than the regime itself', writes Gilbert Achcar .

Thus from a Mixture of all kinds began, That Het’rogeneous Thing, An Englishman: In eager Rapes, and furious Lust begot, Betwixt a Painted Britton and a Scot: Whose gend’ring Offspring quickly learnt to bow, And yoke their Heifers to the Roman Plough: From whence a Mongrel half-bred Race there came, With neither Name nor Nation, Speech or Fame. In whose hot Veins now Mixtures quickly ran,  Infus’d betwixt a Saxon and a Dane. While their Rank Daughters, to their Parents just, Receiv’d all Nations with Promiscuous Lust. This Nauseous Brood directly did contain The well-extracted Blood of Englishmen . . . —From Daniel Defoe, The True-Born Englishman

“If you believe in the cultural idea of virginity , and support the gender inequality behind it, seismic societal change might have to take place to make you think otherwise.” Indeed. The revolutionary change a region such as MENA needs is not one of only a fundamental political-economic change, but in social relations too. Decades ago radical Arab critics such Abou Ali Yassine analysed the taboos – the sexual, the political and the religious – in their interconnection.

When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

"When we grow spring onions in the UK, 60% of the cost is labour," says Derek Wilkinson, managing director at G's Fresh. "In Senegal, labour counts for less than one third ."

“Social media continues to rapidly evolve at a blistering pace that forces society to adapt to the growing distractions. The pertinent question, as ever in history, remains: How did we get here, and where do we go from here? ” My comment: Your 'solution' is vague. Who is the educator? How would you propagate education? Social media platforms owned by big business. What margin do you have to influence the content, the people involved, in spaces you do not own or have control over? Take the example of those social media warriors who have been creating counter-misinformation clips and posts on Facebook or the BBC’s Fact Check. They have not prevented the continuous growth of the far right. 

Emmeline Pankhurst, probably the most venerated in the mainstream British media, defended the presence and reach of the British Empire:  Some talk about the Empire and Imperialism as if it were something to decry and something to be ashamed of. [I]t is a great thing to be the inheritors of an Empire like ours ... great in territory, great in potential wealth. ... If we can only realise and use that potential wealth we can destroy thereby poverty, we can remove and destroy ignorance. For years she travelled around England and North America, rallying support for the British Empire and warning audiences about the dangers of Bolshevism. Quoted in June Purvis, Emmeline Pankhurst: A Biography , London 2002

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.”