Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Forms and Sources of Inequality in the United States

Dear Media: Radovan Karadžić is a European Christian

" In truth, the Libyan intervention was about regime change from the very start.  The threat posed by the Libyan regime’s military and paramilitary forces to civilian-populated areas was diminished by NATO airstrikes and rebel ground movements within the first 10 days. Afterward, NATO began providing direct close-air support for advancing rebel forces by attacking government troops that were actually in  retreat  and had abandoned their vehicles. Fittingly, on Oct. 20, 2011, it was a U.S. Predator drone and French fighter aircraft that  attacked  a convoy of regime loyalists trying to flee Qaddafi’s hometown of Sirte. The dictator was injured in the attack, captured alive, and then extrajudicially  murdered  by rebel forces. The intervention in Libya shows that the slippery slope of allegedly limited interventions is most steep when there’s a significant gap between what policymakers say their objectives are and the orders they issue for the battlefi...

 "Hungaru head towards a general strike..." "... Neoliberalism, which has characterized much of the left-centre Hungarian opposition’s rhetoric, is not a winning ticket in Hungary. The second half of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s second, consecutive term in office may be significantly more difficult for him than the first."

"Molenbeek's Ganster Jihadists" " Certainly, many of those who joined IS from the area did not come from particularly religious backgrounds. There is certainly a sense of disaffection among many in Molenbeek. I spent an evening on a street corner talking to one young Muslim man who had been accused of attempting to travel to Syria.  He alternated between fixing me with an intense stare, and refusing to make any eye contact - exuding an air of slight volatility. Initially when I told him I wanted to understand why someone would commit an attack like the one in Paris - he told me I should travel to Raqqa, and ask people there. For him Western air strikes against IS were the answer.  But then he changed his mind. It was the fault of domestic conditions. He railed against the Belgian government - against white Belgians, who hated those of Arab descent, he said. And he would repeat "there is no democracy here" - a feeling that you can't express any...

The endless war of who gets what [Note: there is some inaccurate figures on the South Korean War and the massacre]

Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse Related Al-Azm on the Syrian uprising

Britain Brexit: Stay or Leave? Children Abused "on an Industrial Scale"

British imperialism's realism "Assad and rebels should join forces against IS: UK parliamentary committee"

Eros and Civilization for a Jobless Future: Herbert Marcuse and the Abolition of Work " Surplus-repression and the performance principle compel people to internalize the constant drive to work, compete, and produce. They are also evident in the vehement hostility directed against individuals who refuse to work, appear to be lazy or unproductive, or seem generally free of social constraint. Surplus-repression and the performance principle are most apparent in conservative attacks on the welfare state, and they are well known to protesters who have been yelled at by passersby to “GET A JOB!” Social anxieties about pleasure and freedom proliferate, demanding submission to authoritarian forces of repression: “As the reality principle takes root, even in its most primitive and most brutally enforced form, the pleasure principle becomes something frightful and terrifying; the impulses for free gratification meet with anxiety, and this anxiety calls for protection against them” (Marc...

" This is the country where toddlers shoot their mothers and the police wage a murderous war against black Americans. This is the country  that has attacked and sought to overthrow more than 50 governments, many of them democracies, and bombed from Asia to the Middle East, causing the deaths and dispossession of millions of people.  No country can equal this systemic record of violence. Most of America's wars (almost all of them against defenseless countries) have been launched not by Republican presidents but by liberal Democrats: Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama." In 1947, a series of National Security Council directives described the paramount aim of American foreign policy as a world substantially made over in America's own image. The ideology was messianic Americanism. We were all Americans. Or else. Heretics would be converted, subverted, bribed, smeared or crushed. Donald Trump is a symptom of this, but he is also a maverick. He says the i...

Scenario for a Wonderful Tomorrow What  about Europe? And why dwell so long on the refugee crisis when I’m supposed to be discussing a book on the euro crisis? The answer is that Merkel’s immigration policy offers an object lesson in what other countries can expect from Germany acting European. Just as the United States sees the world as an extended playing field for its domestic political economy, Germany has come to consider the European Union as an extension of itself, where what is right for Germany is by definition right for all others. There is nothing particularly immoral about this; indeed Germans think it is supremely moral, as they identify their control of Europe with a post-nationalism understood as anti-nationalism, which in turn is understood as the quintessential lesson of German history. Very much like the US, German elites project what they collectively regard as self-evident, natural and reasonable onto  their  outside world, and are puzzled that a...

A headline on foreignpolicy.com " THE ROTTEN HEART OF EUROPE:   Belgium’s political dysfunction and economic marginalization of Muslim communities put us all in danger, FP’s Leela Jacinto writes." What a surprise! " But while Europe offered the sort of economic opportunities for which the 1960s generation of migrants was grateful, their children have been not so lucky. The economic downturn since the late 1970s saw the closure of Belgian coal mines and heavy industries, leaving areas of urban blight. Belgium’s national unemployment rate, hovering around 8 percent, climbs to   more than 20 percent among the youth population . Among Belgians of Moroccan or Turkish origin, that figure can double to around 40 percent. Add high unemployment to the mix of poor policing, fuddled administration and services, and you have the perfect breeding grounds for marginalization and radicalization. Tiny Belgium today has the dubious distinction of being the country with the highe...

Here’s What a Man Who Studied Every Suicide Attack in the World Says About ISIS’ Motives This is a partial take on the issue... One needs to delve into the cities and neighbourhoods ( see, for example the study on Jihadism in Daouar Hicher in Tunis) to identify sociological and psychological motives. In addition, there is a bigger picture: local and Western state terrorism, repression, economic and financial terrorism by local and international agents, decades of marginalizations and humuliation...

10 “Based on a True Story” Movies That Really Aren’t

Contradiction, Systemic Crisis and the Direction for Change: An Interview with Wang Hui " The transition in China’s form of development is currently framed in terms of “upgrading and updating” and industrial transfer. From the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street, many people—from the standpoint of very different political aspirations—have predicted that a similar situation would occur and even encouraged one to occur in China. But, disappointingly for these people, this expected “revolution” has not yet appeared in China, while street revolution is already widespread in Euro-America. Why? It is not because social contradictions and conflicts do not exist in China or because there are no problems with China’s mode of development. It is rather due to two reasons: First, the fact that China is vast and regions are unevenly developed has ironically acted as a buffer in the context of the financial crisis. Regional disparity, rural–urban disparity, disparity between the rich and poor...

From Illusion to Empire: Chuang on the Creation of the Chinese Economy “China” was very much a product of the Occidental imagination. The people Pereira asked had trouble even understanding the question of what “country” they were from, as there were no clear indigenous correlates to the concept. Ultimately they explained that there was one ruler, but many countries, which still used their ancient names. The combination of these countries composed the “Great Ming,” but each retained much of its local specificity. This detail was a mere curiosity when the account was published in Europe, which had established “China” as its arcane, ancient counterpart—less the name for a country than a designation for the external limits to early capitalist expansion and colonization. Such projects tended to run aground on the East Asian mainland, which proved capable of massive trade in goods and silver but resistant to true incorporation into the new global economy. China designated an obstructio...

Obama's imperialist view In 1881, the British journalist Edward Dicey wrote of the great democratic revolt in Egypt, led by Ahmed 'Urabi against the British Empire and its puppet regime of the Khedivate:

"In Egypt - as, for that matter, in any Mussulman country -parliamentary government is an impossibility, as incomprehensible to the Oriental mind as the differential calculus would be to a ploughboy." 
In an interview with The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, Obama made the following comments regarding "the Middle East":

 "You have countries that are failing to provide prosperity and opportunity for their people. You've got extremist… ideologies. You've got countries that have few civic traditions, so as autocratic regimes start fraying, the only organising principles are sectarian.  

 "Contrast that with Southeast Asia, which still has huge problems… but is filled with… ambitious, energetic people who are every single day clawing...

Primo Levi's Heartbreaking, Heroic Answers to the Most Common Questions He Was Asked About "Survival in Auschwitz" "And yet varied sources of information were available to most Germans. Knowing and making things known was one way of keeping one’s distance from Nazism. But most Germans didn’t know because they didn’t want to know. Because, indeed, they wanted not to know. It is certainly true that the German people, as a whole, did not even try to resist. In Hitler’s Germany a particular code was widespread—those who knew did not talk; those who did not know did not ask questions; those who did ask questions received no answers. Shutting his mouth, his eyes, and his ears, the typical German citizen built for himself the illusion of not knowing, hence of not being an accomplice to the things taking place in front of his very door... "...  Everybody must know, or remember, that Hitler and Mussolini, when they spoke in public, were believed, applauded, admire...

Saving capitalism from Donald Trump and the extreme left "The imminent triumph of Donald Trump as the Republican candidate in the upcoming US presidential election is really worrying mainstream economists. Adair Turner was head of the UK’s financial regulation authority where he was a great success in stopping UK banks engaging in reckless speculation (joke!). He is a former vice-chairman of Merrill Lynch Europe and lectures at the London School of Economics. He has now published a book, Between Debt and the Devil, in which he argues that to get the global economy going, central banks and  governments must opt for ‘helicopter money’  i.e. central banks should credit every household bank account with several thousand dollars, euros or pounds, so that they can directly spend the cash and restore aggregate demand, boost output and encourage companies to invest for higher growth. I have discussed before  the nature of helicopter money and its likely success...

Frédéric Lordon on the Democracy in Europe Movement