NM's blog

It is possible to give many instances of how the rule of colonial difference—of representing the “other” as inferior and radically different, and hence incorrigibly inferior—can be employed in situations that are not, in the strict terms of political history, colonial.  These instances come up not only in relations between countries or nations, but even within populations that the modern institutions of power presume to have normalized into a body of citizens endowed with equal and nonarbitrary rights. Indeed, invoking such differences are, we might say, commonplaces in the politics of discrimination, and hence also in the many contemporary struggles for identity. This reason makes it necessary to study the specific history of the colonial state, because it reveals what is only hidden in the universal history of the modern regime of power. —Partha Chatterjee,  The Nation and Fragments,  1993, pp. 34-35

This short book “restores to the word "imperialism" the force that liberal commentary has tried to drain from it: not a relic of pith helmets and colonial maps, but the living logic of a capitalist world system hurtling through war, genocide, ecological plunder and great-power rivalry.” The first trap the author warns us of is the liberal hypocrisy , “which recognises Russian aggression in Ukraine or Chinese threats towards Taiwan as imperialist, while treating Western wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria or Gaza as tragic mistakes committed in the name of higher ideals. “The second is "campist" fantasy, which sees every enemy of Washington as progressive by definition. “ To oppose NATO expansion does not require prettifying Russian imperialism. To oppose US encirclement of China does not require pretending Beijing is a socialist alternative. To defend Palestine does not require outsourcing liberation to regional states whose own ruling classes pursue power, mar...

The reviewer does not mention the formation of nation states in Europe. Did that have no effect on Zionists? Does the author himself incorporate the nation state in The Foundations of Zionism ?

A liberal take As Greg Bovino strode towards the stage, the crowd erupted into chants: “USA! USA! USA!” It was late May, several months since Bovino’s ignoble ousting as the greatcoat-clad “commander at large” of US border control. But for this audience, Bovino’s record was not a liability. It was his calling card. In Figueira da Foz, a sleepy Portuguese beach town just south of Porto, a few hundred of Europe’s most important far-right influencers, decision makers and activists had gathered for the “Remigration Summit”.  A gathering to strategise how to expel millions of migrants deemed ethnically “unsuitable” from Europe, by force or encouragement, including those legally settled. The Americans — not just Bovino but several dozen, including Stefano Forte, president of the New York Young Republican Club — were the guests of honour. Remigration, Bovino told his audience, is the defining political issue of our time. “I’ll make you a deal, Europe,” he said. “We get this remigration un...

A good article by Julia Neima. The following are excerpts only. Access to the full article requires a subscription . Cuba is undergoing its biggest economic transformation in decades: private firms are back and small businesses employ a quarter of the workforce. But market reform has brought no political opening. TaTamanía is Cuba’s first private care home, which opened this spring in the capital’s Vedado district. This type of business was long prohibited under the revolution, but in recent years, a lack of resources has left public care facilities in a critical state. The economic, commercial and financial vice is tightening as Washington expands the scope of its sanctions…  Trump’s strategy is to throttle the state monopoly and force the Cuban government to allow a private sector to develop. This challenge has caused major upheaval in what has until recently been one of the world’s most state-controlled economies.  The agricultural reform of 1959, the sweeping nationalisati...

Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction. To have a good instance of qualitative populism we no longer need the Piazza Venezia in Rome or the Nuremberg Stadium. There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People…  Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances — every day, in every part of the world. Italian writer Umberto Eco, Ur-Fascism, The New York Review of Books,  1995

Mayfair means money

In 2025,  Elon Musk  received the median Tesla worker’s pay every 4.23 seconds. He received  over 2.5m times as much compensation at  Tesla  as the company’s average worker. The report also looks at  Donald Trump ’s  income  in 2025. At  $2.2bn , largely from his crypto holdings, Trump’s income rose nearly 254% from 2024. The median US worker would require 43,154 years to earn what Trump received in 2025. That's what the far-right and the neofascists applaud and justify, including their support of imperialist aggressions.

Cuba: a tiny island nation that upset U.S. hegemony through the power of example. Even as a revolutionary, Castro often spoke in radical-liberal tones about freedom, about democracy, about the rule of law. He insisted that these values could not be realized without the economic justice of state-distributed medicine, of education, of collective ownership of Cuban energy and utilities. “We haven’t chosen this struggle,” said El Presidenté while wearing military fatigues and brandishing a rifle in 1967; “It’s been imposed on us.” As a statesman, Castro was at his best when he asserted how socialism was needed to achieve the liberal ideals that were stymied under free-market capitalism. At the same time, El Presidenté was at his worst as a dictator who ruled undemocratically. The customary military fatigues; the strident hours-long speeches; the greying beard: by the end of the 20th century, they all appeared the gamey trappings of an aging autocrat. Same-sex relations were officially decr...

A report by the Transnational Institute  (a pdf document)

From Rami Abou Jamous's diary

The army resides in the DNA of Israeli society. It is in the education system and the media, in cinema, television and the myriad images that surround society.  My oldest sister left the country with her family just before her eldest son turned 16 so that he wouldn't be drafted into the IDF. — Israeli filmmaker Netalie Braun

Some topped Palestine. Others were killed before their results were announced Related Fatima Nofal gave birth to Zaid after losing three sons in an Israeli air strike in 2023. Fifteen months later, another Israeli strike killed him in central Gaza.

In her 2024 book “Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Freedom to Palestinians,” Israeli scholar Maya Wind argues that Israeli universities have long helped produce knowledge that sustains Israel’s rule over Palestinians while presenting themselves as liberal, democratic institutions.  Amid an increase in academic partnerships between U.S. and Israeli universities , Wind  told +972  last August that the latter “are in fact deeply implicated in Israeli settler colonialism and now in genocide” — not least because entire academic disciplines “subordinate their knowledge production to the needs of the Israeli state.” 

Andrew Zimmern, a TV host and food system advocate: “I  learned everything I needed to learn about Moroccan culture in that room. That the Muslim women took sanctuary in that kitchen… it changed the way I looked at womanhood.” How many Moroccan women has Zimmern seen or known in his life? There is no Western-like Moroccan women with 'Western culture' or a hybrid of cultures, with a very similar culture in the kitchen, at work, without a headscarf. I have been in Morocco and at least in 5 of its cities from the south to the north. Zimmern knows next to nothing about 'Moroccan Muslim women in their diverse 'culture' and outlook .  Because he met one kind of women, he generalised his experience on all Moroccan women and the 'Moroccan culture': on the one on the field, the one in the factory, the one in shorts, the one wearing a headscarf, the student in jeans, the one in sport, the artist, the girl that takes her bras in a concert, the underground prostitutes …...

يُطلب من النساء الاندماج في فضاء طارد بطبيعته اللوجستية، ليتحول تواجدهن من شراكة حقيقية إلى "ديكور جندري" يؤثث المشهد دون أن يمتلك القدرة على تغيير قواعد اللعبة أو إعادة صياغة أولويات الفضاء نفسه.

In the age of dominance

Although Vincent Smith was not the most distinguished imperial historian of India, he was probably the most widely known in India because of the success of his textbooks on Indian history. In 1919, Smith published a rejoinder to the Montagu-Chelmsford constitutional proposals seeking to placate nationalist demands by conceding a certain measure of “responsible government” to Indians. The proposals, Smith said, were based on two propositions: “(1) that a policy, assumed to have been successful in Western communities,  can  be applied to India; and (2) that such a policy  ought  to be applied to India, even at the request of an admittedly small body of Indians, because Englishmen believe it to be intrinsically the best. 5 His argument was that both propositions were false. The policy of responsible and democratic government, “supposed to be of universal application,” could not be applied to India because it went against “a deep stream of Indian tradition which has bee...