Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

War is here: The Lebanese political elites unite again

I cannot disclose who said the following, but the arguments about the US and British armies today sound very interesting. "The peasants [of the Russian army prior 1917] in uniform weren't mercenaries, but conscripts. The US and British soldiers [today] aren't conscripts, not the historical equivalent of the Russian imperial army, but the historical equivalent of Hessians or the Swiss guard. There's a huge difference between those two. Only a conscript is a worker in uniform - all the others are bourgeois cops with bigger or smaller guns. Edit: I can't find any historical example where a revolution was won with the aid of professional soldiers - it was always won by defeating them, be they Hessians, the Swiss Guard or Cossacks...and some US soldiers are OK and have resisted imperialism - still doesn't change the US military's role as a whole... I never said a soldier "can't act in favour of the masses because he wasn't conscr...

A historian with an Islamophobic approach and poor historiography, and a journalist with good arguments, but a partial take.  Lacking in Osborne's perpective is violence in historical "Islam". There is no "Islam, religion of peace" or violent "Islam". There is historical Islam with both peace and violence like historical Christianity, Hinduism, "capitalist democracy", etc. "No, Channel 4: Islam is not responsible for the Islamic State"

"When Russia is involved in a strategically important conflict, RT becomes a tool of war communication, as CNN did for the US during the Iraq war. It then turns into a willing international conduit for the official version of events. In Syria, where RT has often given a platform to Bashar al-Assad, the outcome of the battle of Aleppo crystallised the deep antagonism of the war of information between Russia and the West: after the Syrian army retook the city, RT showed people celebrating in west Aleppo, while most of western media focused on the humanitarian situation in the eastern districts (see Hélène Richard,  Covering Aleppo ). RT invited a former British diplomat to comment on the ‘inevitable civilian losses’ during the liberation of Mosul by US-backed Iraqi forces." "RT, Russia's Voice to the World"

One more confirmation that the US imperialist, criminal regime has never planned a 'regime change' in Syria. First it called for "a Syrian regime without al-Assad, then gave limited support to the rebels, which could not even defend itself against the killing machine of the Syrian regime and its Russian backers. 

"Does Nicola Sturgeon really want to break with centuries of Scottish tradition by standing with the oppressor and backing an apartheid regime which is hell-bent on the oppression of Palestinians through a brutal military occupation in the Gaza Strip, West Bank and East Jerusalem?" Scotland's First Minister backs Israel's dark arts

This was written before the wiping out of UK Independent Party, for example, but a lot of it is still relevant if you add the future water wars and environmental disasters. The coming global civil war: Is there a way out?

Like in Rwanda and other wars, we, "the civilized", watched the spectacle and enjoyed "the peace" at home. The battle of Mosul: "Kill them all"

It is still embedded in their psychy The British Empire is "something to be proud of" Also One of the causes of Brexit is that there is " our country’s post-imperial reluctance to let go of the idea that we are a great nation, combined with our post-second-world-war delusion that we were still a great power. That was why we refused the chance to join the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951, and our infatuation with our own greatness was sufficiently undamaged by Suez in 1956 to make us refuse to join the EEC when that got going with the Treaty of Rome in 1958. If we’d committed ourselves to Europe early, with everyone else, we’d now have a much deeper understanding of our real relationship to the continent, namely that we belong there." — Philip Pullman

"In school, boys who play war games with model soldiers aren’t viewed with suspicion by their teachers, whereas boys who carry knives into the playground are likely to be reported to the police. This may be wise, but the boys with knives understand something about war that the boys with model soldiers don’t: war is an intimate business. Some of the nastiest things happen close up, between individuals. Sometimes they don’t involve weapons. At dinner parties, journalists back from war zones are occasionally asked what it was really like. Perhaps the most accurate answer would be to rape the hostess, murder the host, cut the children’s throats and set fire to the house, without any explanation. There is much talk of war crimes, as if all war was not a crime." Nuremburg rally, invasion of Poland, Dunkirk

On capitalism, class and race Does David Roediger disagree with Ellen Meiksins Wood?

Forgetting Fanon, remembering Fanon

Towards the end of the British Empire, the British ruling class suddenly became humane. How Britain supported the early release of Rudolf Hess

The chemical attack at Khan Sheikoun

"It imperative that loyalty to a state be secured, and the nation is the means. Workers have often been asked to accept rises in interest rates, cuts in wages and services, or participation in imperialist wars, but never for the benefit of capitalism, always for the benefit of a particular nation, for “the national interest”. It is not only the state which makes such appeals. The organisations of the working class themselves reinforce reformist class consciousness within a national context. At the most elementary level this is because such organisations are unwilling to challenge the nationalism within which political discourse is conducted, for fear of being labelled unpatriotic. More importantly, however, it is because they seek either to influence or determine policy within the confines of the existing nation-state. Typically, therefore, nationalism is invested with the contradictory character of the reformist world view." The National Question, Class and the European U...

“A lot has changed in the past 300 years,” Captain Picard explains to a cryogenically unfrozen businessman from the 20th century in an episode of a later “Star Trek” franchise, “The Next Generation.” “People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We’ve eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions. We’ve grown out of our infancy.” In The New York Times 'Star-Treck" and its debt to revolutionary socialism

My brother loves dogs. He's git a huge dog. My mum doesn't like dogs. She prefers cats. We have always had cats in our house. Dogs in Ancient Islamic Culture

An open letter to Emmanuel Macron

"Muslims were always ready to learn from other cultures, and in the late fifteenth century they did so from the heirs of Genghis Khan. The Ottoman Empire in Asia Minor, the Middle East, and North Africa, the Safavid Empire in Iran, and the Moghul Empire in India would be created on the basis of the Mongol army state and become the most advanced states in the world at the time. But the Mongols also unwittingly inspired a spiritual revival. Jalal ad-Din Rumi (1207–73) had fled the Mongol armies with his family, migrating from Iran to Anatolia, where he founded a new mystical Sufi order. One of the most widely read Muslims in the West today, his philosophy is redolent of the refugee’s homelessness and sense of separation, but Rumi was also enthralled by the vast extent of the Mongol Empire and encouraged Sufis to explore boundless horizons on the spiritual plane and to open their hearts and minds to other faiths. But no two people will respond to the same trauma identically, howev...

Making sense of China's global ambitions

A reminder to those who oppose Trump's camcellation of the CIA programme in Syria. Against amnesia and not to forget the criminal role of US imperialism. "The main role of the CIA, from the time it first intervened in 2012, was to block the anti-Assad opposition forces from acquiring the arms necessary to bring down the regime. The most the CIA was prepared to allow was for the opposition to put sufficient military pressure on Assad to force the regime to accept a negotiated settlement. "The rationale for the arms program was, from early on, muddled. It wasn’t supposed to make rebels win outright. ... instead, the U.S. government tried to use a remotely managed proxy war to force an extremely delicate, negotiated political resolution." So much for your fantasies about "regime change". After Daesh took Mosul in 2014 even that limited support was increasingly withdrawn, as the US tried to push the opposition into abandoning the struggle against Assad and ...

“Political economy, in the widest sense, is the science of the laws governing the production and exchange of the material means of subsistence in human society. Production and exchange are two different functions. Production may occur without exchange, but exchange — being necessarily an exchange of products—cannot occur without production. Each of these two social functions is subject to the action of external influences which to a great extent are peculiar to it and for this reason each has, also to a great extent, its own special laws. But on the other hand, they constantly determine and influence each other to such an extent that they might be termed the abscissa and ordinate of the economic curve. The conditions under which men produce and exchange vary from country to country, and within each country again from generation to generation. Political economy, therefore, cannot be the same for all countries and for all historical epochs. A tremendous distance separates the bow and a...

The Life and Death of Yugoslav Socialism

Morocco: Despotism, neoliberalism and climate change

Not just being right, but getting free

"The climate movement made an enormous mistake. We focused all our attention on fossil fuels, when we should have been pointing to something much deeper: the basic logic of our economic operating system." Indeed . Clean energy won't save us

Pour François Burgat, les islamistes ont toujours raison

France, "anti-semitism", the state, the left A good dissection. "First, it is important to establish some of the political and ideological conditions in today’s France. Aside from Germany, France is the European state in which it is most difficult to criticize Israel explicitly. It is the country in which it is possible to be prosecuted for articulating a pro-Palestine position — even a relatively moderate, two-state position. The prosecutions of the journalist  Daniel Mermet , the philosopher  Edgar Morin , the political scientist Samir Naïr, the novelist Danièle Sallenave, to cite a few instances, make this clear." The Anti-Zionism of Fools