Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

 The repression of the yellow vests

 The Eye of Providence

 

The Syrian Revolution Between the Politics of Life and the Geopolitics of Death

  Watch for this story and compare how much coverage it will have compared to the coverage of the four people recently killed in France. “And it wasn't just that these alleged executions took place, it was the manner of impunity by which they happened. In fact, according to the report, there was an air of competitiveness within the special forces. One moment stood out in Gen Campbell's address: when he described how some junior soldiers had allegedly been coerced to shoot unarmed civilians to get their "first kill" - a practice known as "blooding". He said that weapons and radios had then been allegedly planted to support claims that the victims had been enemies killed in action.” We’ll we ever see “Je suis Afghan civilian”? Australian elite troops killed Afghan civilians [for practice]

  Biden may pave the way for a more competent autocrat [sic] Trump has never been an autocrat. I don’t see the author using the word metaphorically.

 Another page of the unfinished book of corruption in the UK, and especially in England. What will the “public” do? “I don’t care much. That’s how things are. Now I am looking forward to the vaccine to go back to my normal life.” Then comes the ritual again: we will cross a piece of paper “to make a change.” It is more likely that the Conservatives will be re-elected. Indifference is not only towards migrants ‘dying’ in the seas and the vulnerable in society, but also to cronyism and clientelism at home. Corruption of the City of London, the Panama Files, HSBC money laundering ... have not made the “public” even protest on the street. Faith combined with fear and conservatism are still working in favour of the ruling class.  Despite of what has happened since 2008/09, there is a general sense that the state has managed the crisis and the pandemic. The state intervened and has been paying those made unemployed. Thus the resignation. Cronyism and clientelism How Covid revealed t...

“ Robinson makes the point in a number of his novels that to be dogmatic, to preach instead of to explore, is to surrender to the very constraints that we need to challenge.“ Kim Stanley Robinson

  The Return of Nature

Cruise liners turned into jails for migrants

 Save capitalism, tax boomers, new report suggests

One of the two bookshops on the same street, where I bought some of my favourite books mainly during the period between 1995-2000, when I left political activism and immersed myself in reading on the benches of l’Avenue Habib Bourguiba. It was the period when I was trying to get a passport. The Sexual Revolution and The Mass Psychology of Fascism  (French versions) by Wilhelm Reich Germinal by Emile Zola Zorba by Nicos Kazantzakis (French version) The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells One-Dimentional Man by Herbert Marcuse (Arabic version) The Second Sex (le deuxième sex) by Simone de Beauvoir and others One man’s fights to preserve relic of bygone age

 A feminist icon from 13th century Hafsid era

  Decolonising Maghreb history

“The United States, as pundits hourly remind us, is now cleaved into two almost equal-sized political universes. But power abhors stalemates and clearly in the present world the evolution is towards differential experiments in post-fascist oligarchy and pseudo-democracy. A weak and court-enchained Biden-Harris White House, built on the betrayal of progressives and subservient to a donor class of Silicon Valley and Wall Street billionaires, will face a new depression without the wind of popular enthusiasm at its back. Where does this point except to total destruction in the 2022 midterm and the further triumph of the new darkness?” — Ecologist and geographer Mike Davis

Brave New World was a far shrewder guess at the likely shape of a future tyranny than Orwell’s vision of Stalinist terror... 1984 has never really arrived, but Brave New World is around us everywhere. —JG Ballard, 2002

 Did America commit war crimes in Vietnam? Related The most notorious war crime of the Vietnam era

Our media are dominated by ethnic strife while largely ignoring class struggles “Ethnic differences entwine with other social differences –especially of class, region, and gender. Ethnonationalism is strongest where it can capture other senses of exploitation. The most serious defect of recent writing on ethnonationalism has been its almost complete neglect of class relations (as in Brubaker, 1996; Hutchinson, 1994; Smith, 2001). Others wrongly see class as materialistic, ethnicity as emotional (Connor, 1994: 144–64; Horowitz, 1985: 105–35). This simply inverts the defect of previous generations of writers who believed that class conflict dominated while ignoring ethnicity. Now the reverse is true, and not only among scholars. Our media are dominated by ethnic strife while largely ignoring class struggles. Yet in actuality these two types of conflict infuse each other. Palestinians, Dayaks, Hutus, and so on believe they are being materially exploited. Bolsheviks and Maoists believed t...

 

  Pandemic, China, Israel, the US, the Arab uprisings ...