Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

1. This is a 7-year war with half of the population either displaced or made refugees, and with about 400,000 killed (93% of them killed by the regime). 2. This is a brutal regime which crushed an uprising and a revolutionary prospect, supported by one regional power, which was the main winner from the destruction of Iraq, a furure winner in Syria and "a threat" to Israel, and an authoritarian state, which is a  big global power, but not a super-power, and it is in a geopolitical power struggle with the big imperialist states for spheres of influence. It used to be a friend of the main imperialist powers when a drunkard man opened the gates to "free market" and sold half of the country to foreign capitalists and newly-born local  ones, some of them now live in London. It is a regime that waged a  brutal war on the Chetchens and his "democratic" friends of the time looked the other way. 3. On the other side, known imperialist states, agents of glob...

“Idiot is a word derived from the Greek ἰδιώτης, idiōtēs ("a private citizen", "individual"), from ἴδιος, idios ("private", "one's own"). In ancient Greece, people who were not capable of engaging in the public sphere were considered "idiotes", in contrast to the public citizen, or "polites". An idiot in Athenian democracy was someone who was characterized by self-centeredness and concerned almost exclusively with private—as opposed to public—affairs."

The conflict in Yemen is not really about Iranian influence, as is often claimed to and in Western capitals. It’s certainly not about legitimacy or democracy, nor yet about sect, creed or colour. It’s about filthy lucre, and the corrupt access to it via state-capture. The Arab Spring—a rising up of the “street” against the  kleptocracy —was co-opted and corrupted in Yemen by  political factions  (and their foreign sponsors.) The UN-sponsored  National Dialogue Conference  supposed to be a national fresh start after decades of corruption, nepotism and misrule, was itself corrupted by those very factions it sought to replace: many of the ancien regime were able to retain and leverage ill-gotten political and financial resources, despite those being the major cause of the 2011 uprising. And the West stood idly by. Radix Malorum est Cupiditas "Greed is the root of evil"

What kind of a war is the Yemen war?

Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has said in the aftermath of the 'Western' attack on Syria that "The US president, UK prime minister and the president of France are criminals." So are him, Bashar al-Assad and Putin. 

Lessons from the History of America's Defeats

The number of homeless people dying on the streets or in temporary accommodation in the UK has more than doubled over the past five years to more than one per week. The average age of a rough sleeper when they die is 43, about half the UK life expectancy. Homelessness in Britain

Gulf Cooperation Council arms race

Imperialist hypocrisy Al-Assad regime has used chemical weapons against civilians in Ghouta, killing at 70 people.We should do something about it. Al-Asad regime and its allies have been responsible for 93% of the detahs in Syria.  Mr Al-Assad, you can carry on killing, but you shouldn't use chemical weapons. Use other weapons and we will continue looking the other way. After all, although we hate the Russians and the Iranians, we stil prefer you to the 'jihadists' and 'terrorists', you are 'secualr', and you and your wife are 'Western-educated liberals'. Otherwise, you know, that we are resposnible for saving people since time immemorial, and we will not stand by and watch. In fact, we don't want to attack you. Our real objective is Putin and the Russian state. You know, Ukraine, geo-politics, that poisoning thing in Salisbury, etc.

Arabie Saudite Dans l’euphorie, certains observateurs commencent à parler de «   printemps de Riyad   » et de «   postwahhabisme   ». Mais le désenchantement intervient vite. Dès que la conjoncture économique s’améliore et que la situation politique se clarifie, le régime revient peu à peu aux fondamentaux et ferme la parenthèse «   libérale   ». Après 2011, les choses s’accélèrent. L’Arabie saoudite inaugure une «   contre-révolution   » préventive, dont le fer de lance est le wahhabisme. Alors que les budgets de l’institution religieuse sont augmentés, les oppositions séculaire et islamiste sont muselées. Le régime affiche également son respect de l’orthodoxie wahhabite dans l’espace public, notamment en appliquant rigoureusement la peine de mort et les châtiments corporels, tout en promouvant le discours antichiite. En contrepartie, les oulémas font une petite concession : les femmes sont autorisées à voter aux élections municipale...

A social investigation into the disproportionate levels of violence and murder suffered by the black community of Britain, this documentary identifies the failure of the British educational system, the breakdown of family units, and consumerism/capitalism as significant contributory factors into this phenomenon. With interviews from gunmen, underground arms dealers, drug users and victims of the violence, the film attempts to define the social environment which conditions and nurtures the desire to consume and destroy.

Filmed over six months, Bang Bang In Da Manor has been described as the most graphic and disturbing documentary ever made in Britain.

“When the Spanish republic was threatened, capitalism chose tyranny,” he added. “So, the better men who could not abide that choice came to  Spain  [to fight]. Today, that same choice confronts us again. — David Simon 

Our educated elite According to Karen Pierce, the UK's ambassador to the UN, Karl Marx was Russian! During the Syria debate, she commented: "With respect to Karl Marx, I think he must be turning in his grave to see what has become of his country… in its defense of the use of chemical weapons against the innocent.” Pierce's Russian counterpart said that Marx and Lenin were frequent visitors to London. Lenin was. Marx wasn't a frequent visitor, but lived almost half of his life in the city.

Ian Wright [Open University, UK] dismisses the mainstream causes of rising inequality: namely, unequal distribution of profits and wages or lower taxes on the rich; or automation driving down wages relatively for those not working in ‘knowledge-based’ industries.  Instead, the causes of rising inequality must be found in the very nature of the capitalist mode of production.  As Wright puts it,  “capitalism is a system in which one economic class systematically exploits another. And its economic exploitation — not housing, tax policies or low wages — that is the root cause of the economic inequality we see all around us.” Inequality and exploitation

Twenty-First Century Victorians

Did Marx have a labour theory of value?

The likely U.S.-led strikes on Syria will be another spectacle .

The End of French Intellectuals

"This is one of the craziest things about the modern age. We would never let the government or a corporation put cameras/microphones in our homes or location trackers on us. But we just went ahead and did it ourselves [ and for free ] because – to hell with it! – I want to watch cute dog videos." — Dylan  Curran, the Guardian Did Orwell forsee this? 

Farewell Faleh Abdul-Jabbar

The unsevered umbilical cord that leaves large swathes of the Global South economically reliant on their old colonial powers, even after formally attaining national independence, is the  structural dependence  of these peripheral states on foreign credit and investment, which has long been provided to them by private banks, international investors and financial institutions in the advanced capitalist countries. Subjecting the nature of this structural dependence to closer theoretical and empirical scrutiny may therefore allow us to approach the problems faced by “the new debt colonies” from a somewhat different angle, enabling us to better understand the more subtle contemporary forms of financial subjugation operating at the structural and institutional level that serve to reproduce these deeply entrenched international power asymmetries over time, even in the absence of territorial control or outright military intervention. The New Debt Colonies should be read along with...

You can be your own tyrannical boss The review is short , but  the analysis  is 13 pages long  I personally skipped the pages which contain statistics, etc. I am bad in maths. However, the first pages, and then p. 12 are an essential read. "We identify three interrelated cultural changes that have been influential in explaining recent shifts in young people’s sense of self and identity, and which closely match processes important to perfectionism development. These changes are (a) the emergence of neoliberalism and competitive individualism, (b) the rise of the doctrine of meritocracy, and (c) increasingly anxious and controlling parental practices. In what follows , we describe each of these cultural changes and outline how they relate to perfectionism."

In those early years, Dewey formulated three ideas that would come to define his mature vision of democracy: individualism offers a distorted vision of human freedom, genuine freedom is found in social cooperation, and true social freedom is impossible in a class society. John Dewey

Iraq: "Mission Accomplished" 15 years ago 15 years ago, America destroyed my country

When it comes to the Middle East, the UK is nothing but a rogue state

Neoliberal revisionists are sanatizing/sterilizing Martin Luther King Jr.'s radical legacy and portraying him as a moderate. "In this brief celebratory moment of King’s life and death we should be highly suspicious of those who sing his praises yet refuse to pay the cost of embodying King’s strong indictment of the US empire, capitalism and racism in their own lives." Martin Luther King Jr. was radical

Reposting Emmanuel Macron is a Silicon Valley-loving, union-hating, Third Way centrist. He’s no bulwark against the far right. "Emmanuel Macron is not your friend"

Some interesting arguments of a big picture. However, it is too much political science, too little political economy. Hardly any mention of economic growth, profit, ownership of the means of producing wealth, capitalist uneven development, and what would make the rich countries jeopardise their standard of living for "a new international order" that is just.  It is not clear what the author means by the so often-repeated second person "we". Without political innovation, global capital and technology will rule us without any kind of democratic consultation, as naturally and indubitably as the rising oceans. The libertarian dream – whereby antique bureaucracies succumb to pristine hi-tech corporate systems, which then take over the management of all life and resources – is a more likely vision for the future than any fantasy of a return to social democracy. "The Demise of the Nation State"