Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Kurdish struggle "It was the international community of states that abandoned the Kurds. But the word “abandoned” is misleading, for the Kurdish freedom movement in Rojava never counted on international support in the first place. We all knew very well that US support was tactical and that it would conclude as the US pursued its imperialist, profit-driven agenda. We knew that as soon as ISIS, the so-called common enemy, was defeated, the Kurds would be left vulnerable to all manner of hostility." Is the Rojava's Dream at Risk An interview with Dilar Dirik

Financialisation and the UK economy (An audio interview)

"Internet fibre optic cables around the world trace out the routes of former empires. Cables from Africa route back to their former colonial powers. Lots of cabling from South America still goes back to Spain. Imperialism didn’t stop with decolonisation: it just moved up to infrastructure level. James Bridle is the author of New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future - a brilliant new work that reveals the dark clouds that loom over our technological future: an age of complex uncertainty, predictive algorithms, surveillance, and the hollowing out of empathy."

"A spectre is haunting the British media: the spectre of negative takes on capitalism. Ever since the academic and writer  Ash Sarkar uttered the words  “I’m a communist, you idiot” on national television, the right has recoiled in horror. The alacrity with which commentators jumped on Sarkar’s off-the-cuff comment to relitigate the cold war is deeply revealing." Condemn communists' cruelty, but capitalism has its own terrible record

"The Jews have proved to be first class colonisers, to have the real good, old empire qualities, to be really first class pioneers."  — Herbert Morrison (1888-1965), a British Labour Party leader*. Labour support for Zionism was to continue into the Second World War. In 1944 the party was actually to propsoe the removal of the Arab population from Palestine "on human grounds ...  Let the Arabs be encouraged to move out, as the Jews move in." Quoted in The Blood Never Dried by John Newsinger, 2006, p. 135 *Morrison also   took an aggressive stance against  Iran 's nationalist Prime Minister  Mohammed Mosaddeq  and approved his overthrow.

UK Millions of families are worse off than 15 years ago

Portugal "Voters ushered Mr. Costa, a center-left leader,  into power  in late 2015 after he promised to reverse cuts to their income, which the previous government had approved to reduce Portugal’s high deficit under the terms of an international bailout of 78 billion euros, or $90 billion. Mr. Costa formed an unusual alliance with Communist and radical-left parties, which had been shut out of power since the end of Portugal’s dictatorship in 1974. They united with the goal of beating back austerity, while balancing the books to meet eurozone rules. The government raised public sector salaries, the minimum wage and pensions and even restored the amount of vacation days to prebailout levels over objections from creditors like Germany and the International Monetary Fund. Incentives to stimulate business included development subsidies, tax credits and funding for small and midsize companies." Portugal dared to cast aside austerity  ...

Olivier Roy on "Islamic radicalism" Some good points, but the title of this interview smells bad. I think Roy dealt with some areas of the subject. "The root causes are still there". I don't think he has elaborated on these root causes. "Radicalism", it seems, does not apply to the "Western" states. There are a few  political, economic and cultural features which characterise some Western states as "radicals". I wonder what Roy thinks of the structural violence of the state (Karen Armstrong).  I am a "radicalised" person, but not for the reasons he thinks. Was it just that one day, I got up and wanted radicalism as Roy says? That's nonsense, I'm afraid, and he would make a very bad doctor.

Pakistan The winners are the non-voters. "Khan claims he wants to ‘depoliticise’ the police and establish ‘law and order’ in a violent crime-ridden society; to ‘improve health and education’ through bringing health insurance to 70% of the population. Yet in no way is Khan sympathetic to the interests of Pakistan’s working class or rural farmers.  He is set to follow the dictates of the IMF as the ‘solution’ for Pakistan’s continuing economic failure.  And that means his policy ‘aspirations’ will never be met." It's not cricket See also Khan is only a player in the circus run by Pakistan's military

The struggle for democracy in Morocco

"In Britain, there was more emphasis on the language of economics, specifically the ‘supply side’ idea that the interests of investors and entrepreneurs were paramount. As the theory behind Thatcherism had it, government services shrink everybody’s incentives to produce, compete and invest. They reduce the motivation for businesses to deliver services, and ordinary people’s desire to work. Toughness, even pain, performs an important moral and psychological function in pushing people to come up with solutions. Pain  works . Only pain forces people to adapt and innovate. In practice that may mean all sorts of things: migrating, reskilling, sacrificing weekends or family time, selling property, the ‘gig economy’ and so on. The productiveness of pain is a central conservative belief, whose expression might be economic, but whose logic is deeply moralistic." — William Davis

Tunisia "There is an obvious correlation between drivers of migration and origin of migrants, as the June 2 sea accident showed. Many of the victims in the drowning were identified as originating from the country's south including Gabes, Medenine and Tataouine. Marked by a long history of economic and political marginalisation and frustration since before the 2011 revolution, these regions have continued to suffer." And the IMF continue to impose its criminal diktats Marginalisation driving Tunisians to migrant boats

Syrian actress May Scaff An icon Syrian leftist who opposed Assad's regime dies in Paris

"[T]he dominance of western culture, and its globalisation through this dominance, should not be confused with universalism. Just because a particular discipline or a discourse is accepted or practised throughout the world, it does not mean that discipline or discourse is universally valid and applicable to all societies. After all ... burgers and coke are eaten and drunk throughout the world but one would hardly classify them as universally embraced, healthy and acceptable food : what the presence of burgers and coke in every city and town in the world demonstrate is not their universality but the power and dominance of the culture that produced them. The same logic applies to disciplines and discourses."  — Ziauddin Sardar

"It is not capitalism that is the problem in Habermas’s Europe, but its management. What is wrong with the Europe of monetary union, Habermas implies, is not that it is pro-capitalist, or subservient to capitalist interests, but that it is – contingently – non-democratic, thereby subverting the struggle against the real enemy, nationalism. Democracy is to correct this by making the demands of ordinary people heard as decision makers attend to ‘systemic demands’, refilling the system’s supply of legitimacy. No need to confront the increasingly insatiable demands of the profit-dependent classes for precedence of their interests over those of the rest of society. In fact class interests do not really appear in Habermasian European theory, only biased cognitions of decision makers in need of democratic correction."  A critique of Jürgen Habermas's democratic Europe

"The four freedoms of the single market have made it easier for companies to move money, goods, services and people around the EU, but workers have not benefited. There has been virtually no growth in UK  per-capita incomes  since the start of the financial crisis in 2007, something that has not happened outside wartime in the modern age." Why the moaning? These are sound arguments on Brexit, I think. As regarding whether the British could relate to "radical socialism", I say no. The  voters " would rather have Theresa May running the show than Jeremy Corbyn, just as in 1992 they decided to stick with John Major rather than take a risk with Neil Kinnock." And recent polls give Boris Johnson a lead.

Two criminals working for the interest of the Egyptian people "In exchange for a $12 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund, Sissi agreed in 2016 to put in place austerity measures. These included reducing government subsidies for fuel and other products and services, as well as devaluing the Egyptian pound by more than half in November of that year." Unusual dissent over rapidly increasing prices

"A traumatised society traumatising those wround it." — Arthur Neslen, author of Occupied Minds - A Journey Through the Israeli Psychy . My interview with Neslen back in 2006

I applaud this Manchester students deface Kipling racist poem Note: Rudyard Kipling, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and the poetic voice of British imperialism, hailed Brigadier General Reginald Dyer, the first responsible of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in India as 'The Man Who Saved India.

Another tweet read: “We are at war! The UK armed forces must go to the Islamic areas and should go to door to door and shoot them all." A record number of anti-Muslim attacks last year

"Twenty years ago, Hazan set himself two objectives. The first was only to publish ‘offensive’ texts that ‘did not stop at describing the existing order’ but ‘proposed ways of subverting it’. The second: not to owe a ‘penny of debt’ to the banks. He kept to both aims." Twenty Years of La Fabrique

"The reality is that every  president since Lyndon Johnson has forgotten about  America's poor, and especially, poor Americans of colour . Most politicians rarely use the words  "poor" and "poverty"   in their speeches, unless they intend to criticise the poor for their lot in life.  Yet the black affluent class continues to emphasise racial progress and social mobility as if it's 1978, with Jimmy Carter as president and sitcom  Diff'rent Strokes (starring black actors Gary Coleman and Todd Bridges) an NBC primetime hit." Why I don't understand the black affluent class

After the Panama Files, the "Mafia Files"? "The UK's National Crime Agency would not comment on any current investigation but told the BBC that organised crime syndicates laundered hundreds of billions of pounds a year through London, mainly through complicated company structures." The tentacles of the Italian mafia