Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

 Jailed Loujain al-Hathloul’s health is alarming, say UN experts Related The feminist movement in Saudi Arabia

 The crushing of Chechnya’s aspirations for independence

 Pointless jobs, technology, capitalism

  The world will pay the price for the Democrats’ failures

 The Good Lord Bird

 “It’s clear that Trump’s strategy of polarisation on the basis of a far-right agenda has allowed him to strengthen and expand his popular base. Whoever scrapes into the White House, the US is going to be very hard to govern on the basis of the liberal internationalism that has served big capital so well since WWII. The crisis of the neoliberal version of this hegemony that started under George W. Bush with Iraq and the Global Financial Crisis is going to intensify.” —Alex Callinicos, 04 November 2020

  Condemn death threat against leaders of the education union

 An entrenched and poisonous status quo will continue. “  Rather than a rejection of Trump, the election results reshuffle the finely balanced and deeply polarised configuration that has prevailed in American politics since the days of Bill Clinton in the 1990s.” Trump has not been repudiated Related The left (sic) just got crushed There is leftist wing in the Democratic party, but to say it represents the Left is a fallacy that has been going on for decades, and not only in the US, in order to reject the real left. Even if Biden won with a comfortable majority, including the Senate, his administration would be like others: a representative of big business, making cosmetic changes if the declining economy allowed, hawkish, and imperialist.

“ Heaven be thanked that the soldiers of the Great War cannot return today to discover how their sacrifice has been turned into a fashion appendage.” The Great War?

  On the future of US relations in the region

 Israel could be ‘forced’ to take action against Iran

 History is a merciless teacher

  The economy - some facts

“ The US electoral system is more directly organised by capitalist class power than other democracies, and fund-raising requirements are only one part of this problem. The dominance of the system by two parties of business, with barely any democratic or even strictly ‘party-like’ structures, organised by business-aligned elites, makes it very difficult to mobilise alternatives. This is one of the reasons why there has never been a successful labour-based party in the US. The strategy of takeover by the ‘grassroots’ succeeded only in the Republican Party, where the candidate preferred by the base was a self-funding billionaire. Workers, white or not, are left with choices emerging out of a balance of forces favouring capital.” —Richard Seymour, February 2017 Related Biden: a war cabinet?

Election in an oligarchic, plutocratic system Will the status quo that Trump’s 2016 election upset be restored? Follow the Money for Both Parties Related Biden: a war cabinet?

  The Great Lockdown hits the Third World hard

This piece is still one of most sober analysis of violence by non-state actors. And it is by a liberal magazine. There is a major inaccuracy in a statement though . “ The history  of the West is every bit as violent  as the modern Middle East, with brief periods of relative peace punctuated by periods of bloody conflict.” As violent as? The violence of Nazi Germany, the Belgian Genocide in Congo or the American war on the Vietnamese, just to cite three events, had no comparable examples in the history of the Middle East. The Threat is Already Inside

  Sicily’s enduring North African heritage

 The struggle for real democracy

Robert Fisk, the revered foreign correspondent for The Independent, his knowledge and insight of the Middle East is perhaps unrivalled among contemporary commentators. Fisk, who has met Osama bin Laden three times, talks about his experience of covering conflict throughout the region, the Middle East's history and the possibilities for its future.  Here is part of a talk I recorded at the Institute of Education at the book launch of Fisk's  Wars for Civilization,  London 13 October 2005.  He was a vigorous opponent of the new-fangled concept of “embedded journalism”. Latterly, however, his own embedded reports on the continuing civil war in Syria, which tended to absolve the Assad regime of some of the worst crimes credited to it, provoked a backlash, even among his anti-imperialist acolytes. Obituary

 Bidenomics: boom or bust?