Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Why are people so terrified of socialism?

10 selected films

When one interpreter asked me a few days ago, ‘Why is my five-year-old worth less than a dog?’ I didn’t have an answer.” I have a business idea for Farthing even Alan Sugar, the greatest Brit to ever live, would never think of it: put the dogs on ebay. As of Johnson and Patel, it is sheer hypocrisy. They have been pursuing a hostile environment policy towards refugees, restricting their entry, confining them in detention centres, etc. and now they want to show the world that they care. Britain values dogs more than Aghan people

 A good summary —John Molineux, 28 August 2021

A social-democratic view. The pandemic-induced global slump is just part of a 20-year financial crisis

“ A former British soldier who helped dozens of people leave Kabul after the Taliban’s invasion is stranded in Afghanistan after the Foreign Office bungled the paperwork necessary to evacuate him.” The ‘Taliban’s invasion’? According to Tony Diver and propably The Telegraph itself, Taliban carried out an invasion. I scratched my head: Are Taliban from China or Russia? Or maybe the Taliban have just invaded themselves! No, it is their country you like or not, as it is the country of many who have just fled it.  And it is just a small example of the narrative of the corporate media. 

Afghanistan 1978-2021: A brief summary

A very modest attempt by me. Oh man! Oh man! They couldn’t even liberate Afghanistan .. Oh George! Oh Barack! Why did you leave it to Biden? Oh man! Oh man! They couldn’t liberate Afghanistan .. Oh Hilary! Oh Hilary! Who would have had a laugh  Other than Bin Laden? Oh man! Oh man! Who will liberate the Afghan If not the Americaaan?* * Plural pronunciation of Americans in Arabic. —Nèdeem Mahjoub

“The PA found itself naked after losing the internal sources of legitimacy - revolutionary legitimacy, the legitimacy of resistance and national consensus, the legitimacy of ballot boxes and the legitimacy of achievement,” he said. “It only had external sources of legitimacy - the legitimacy of power and security - after its political project failed and it did not adopt a new project.” Watch what the corporate Western media would say if Palestinians started a mini civil war. Palestinian Authority loosing control of West Bank

“The situation is very different today as the official oil workers have not staged strikes, the contract workers have mainly socio-economic demands and an organized mass revolutionary movement is absent. Political and economic crisis in Iran has obviously influenced the current strikes, and the protests could involve the official workers and spread to other sectors as well in the future. It is, therefore, important to appreciate the contingent and fluid nature of these strikes, rather than conceiving them as repetitions of the past or project on them particular political objectives in an act of wishful thinking.” Labour organising is on the rise among Iranian oil workers

It is difficult to grasp the sheer magnitude of enforced disappearances in Syria. According to recent  estimates , since 2011 over 150,000 Syrians have been disappeared or arbitrarily detained (out of a total population of around  17 million ), most of them by the regime. By comparison, during the Argentinian military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983, the estimated   total of   desaparecidos   was 30,000 (Argentina had a population of around  27 million   at the time). What is more, the regime is known to brutally torture those who  vanish  inside its industrial-scale secret prison system. One of the most notorious locations is the Saydnaya military prison 30 kilometres north of Damascus. Human rights group Amnesty International and a team of forensic architects from Goldsmiths, University of London reconstructed  the Saydnaya complex for an international audience in 2017. No recent photographs exist, so they had to rely exclusively on former detainees’ recollections. The picture that

  التناقض في الإسلام هو بين أتباع السلطة وبين الخارجين عنها

An interesting historical background followed by a couple of good comments “As the United States emerges from one of the greatest employment crises in a century, Roosevelt’s progressive economic platform is salient once again, and for good reason. Today, the need to enact ambitious economic programs is compelling on its own merits. To justify these programs with the specious argument that taking care of white Americans’ material interests will miraculously displace a well-tended reservoir of anti-immigrant sentiment is borne out neither in contemporary political science data nor in history. After all, nine years after the enactment of the New Deal, Japanese Americans found no such relief from California’s white mob and their powerful representatives. Much as we wish it otherwise, it was the New Dealer Roosevelt who was far more effective than Trump in enacting an extremist program of race-based exclusion to cater to white animus.” Roots of today’s anti-Asian hate violence

They keep repeating that humans are responsible for climate change. Are most humans in poor nations the same as the rich in the advanced capitalist countries? Are the humans controlling the multinational companies the same as working class and middle class humans in the poor countries? Humans are responsible means the responsibility must be shared between capitalists–and the defenders of the dominant economic system–and more than half of the world population! The fault of humanity? The 1% emit more than double of the poorest half of humanity Climate breakdown responsibility

The US is “ behind Russia technologically (especially in hypersonic missile and tactical missile defense technologies).” Evidence and fact check is required, I think. One should not exclude recovery while talking about the early stage of decline, i.e. does decline ever happen linearly? I wonder why the author avoids the use of the term imeprialism as an economic and military structure and power relations. Why has the US pulled out of Afghanistan?

The hidden hand of the market that cannot work without a hidden fist-McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. Similarly, selling an invasion, a war, ‘liberation of women’, ‘democracy promotion’, etc. cannot work without a (white) celebrity culture and liberal feminists. Afghan feminists never asked for Meryl Streep’s help—let alone US air strikes Related ‘Against White Feminism’

“Many of Fanon’s recent academic critics, and even some of his sympathizers, continued to distort and misconstrue Wretched. They inflated the significance of one element in the book over all others: violence. And they underplayed Fanon’s socialist commitment and class analysis of capitalism, which are two essential components of his anti-imperialist arsenal. Nowhere is this truer than in recent postcolonial theory. Indeed, postcolonial theory has come to posit violence as the theoretical core of Wretched. Homi K. Bhabha, for example, has turned Fanon’s work into a site of “deep psychic uncertainty of the colonial relation” that “speaks most effectively from the uncertain interstices of historical change.”1 In his recent preface to Wretched, Bhabha reads colonial violence as a manifestation of the colonized’s subjective crisis of psychic identification “where rejected guilt begins to feel like shame.” Colonial oppression generates “psycho-affective” guilt at being colonized, and Bhabha’

The nation state is anti-human.

David Bowie describes the feelings behind the song Related America, America Damascus, 1995

Along with many other Muslim women, I wonder about the feelings of  Muslim women athletes , who have been kicked out of sporting events for body-covering clothing or head coverings. Tell these Muslim athletes that the German gymnasts are being celebrated, and they may ask: Is “girl power” a function of who these women are, white and European?  Are Muslim women also celebrated for their choices when they resist sexist rules and demand control over their apparel and bodies? Quite the opposite.  Muslim women are scorned for modest dress

From Sykes-Picot to a dysfunctional ‘democtacy’

It is natural for a liberal to speak of “democracy” in general; but a Marxist will never forget to ask: “for what class?” —V. I. U.

A couple of points need updating–the death toll of the sanctions on Iraq, for example–but it is still accurate and prophetic. Arundhati Roy in September 2001: Once war begins, it will develop a momentum, a logic and a justification of its own, and we'll lose sight of why it's being fought in the first place. Operation Enduring Freedom is ostensibly being fought to uphold the American Way of Life. It'll probably end up undermining it completely. It will spawn more anger and more terror across the world. For ordinary people in America, it will mean lives lived in a climate of sickening uncertainty: will my child be safe in school? Will there be nerve gas in the subway? A bomb in the cinema hall? The US government, and no doubt governments all over the world, will use the climate of war as an excuse to curtail civil liberties, deny free speech, lay off workers, harass ethnic and religious minorities, cut back on public spending and divert huge amounts of money to the defence i

Here’s where they get their money from

“ From the standpoint of a higher economic form of society, private ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite as absurd as private ownership of one man by another. Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, and, like  boni patres familias,  they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition. [E]xploitation  and squandering of the vitality of the soil (apart from making exploitation dependent upon the accidental and unequal circumstances of individual producers rather than the attained level of social development) takes the place of conscious rational cultivation of the soil as eternal communal property, an inalienable condition for the existence and reproduction of a chain of successive generations of the human race.” — Capital Vol. III Part VI

Palestinian labour, unconquered

Suspicion and prejudice

Oliver says that while he expects more commercialisation of Black and Arab hip hop in France - because “money talks” - he does not foresee it becoming mainstream like in the US. “It would fundamentally challenge the notion of what being French is if you just saw Black and Arab people everywhere and I think they’re too racist to let that happen on a mass level.” Many of the themes embedded in their music are directly influenced by struggles that shaped them, especially the inescapable life of crime they hold no pride in. According to their lyrics at least, where they once existed in a world that rejected them, they now reject the world their success has given them access to. A light in France’s dark corners

“Only once, in 18th and 19th century Britain, did the transformation of energy to coal, transport to railroads and industry to steam power take place via the market co-ordination of investment, without a push from above.” Financial Times, opinion section, ‘For sustainable finance to work, we will need central planning’ , 11 July 2021

“It's a complicated question we've yet to really answer”

Conflicts and commons in the politics of truth Related Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation

Limbo: A story of a Syrian refugee in Scotland

On the pandemic and the vaccine

Finally, some of Mahdi Amel’s writing have been translated to English Selected Writing of Mahdi Amel

Scale of Russian mercenary mission

‘We want trillions to heal our wounds’

Private security and military companies

 التاريخ المنسي لمجازر أمريكا وبريطانيا 

Sudanese communists and aftermath of July 1971 in Kober

It is authoritarian because it is run like a business

The military and the economy in Egypt, Pakistan, Iran and Turkey

On the death cult of capital accumulation

‘The only Black person in the room’

“ I think we need a reconsideration of the whole of the post-1945 period, which is an era in which both authoritarian and semi-democratic governments across the region engaged in massive arms acquisition and then deployed many—in some cases most—of those weapons against their own populations. We usually see this as a process of violent decolonization and then an equally violent postcolonial descent into either authoritarianism or fractured forms of democracy, which is a pattern that of course we can identify elsewhere in the world as well. But actually, when we look through this lens of mass violence, we can see that there are many ways in which this is not a period of decolonization at all. It is a period of  recolonization : a recalibration and a recasting of empire into new shapes, in which superpowers control spaces by combining economic dominance with a deliberate flooding of weaponry in the relevant territory, alongside the careful—and sometimes not so careful—creation of specifi

The revolution of dignity hijacked - an updated background

The focus is on the role of the kafala system in relation to race and domestic labour . However, for a bigger picture that allows us to contextualise all of the above, one should explore  inequality, rentierism and the roots of Lebanon’s 2019 uprising.

On the Island’s diverse present and future

Using ‘imperial’ and avoiding imperialism and capitalism. America isn’t ‘back’. Here’s why Related “ About 42 percent of Americans are now either unaware of the fact that their country is still fighting wars in the Greater Middle East and Africa or think that the war on terror is over. Consider that for a moment. What does it mean to be fighting wars for a country in which a near majority of the population is unaware that you’re even doing so?” “I tell my son that people die in wars because so many of us turn our backs on what’s going on in the world we live in.” Andrea Mazzarino from Cost of War Project

The toppling of Saddam’s statue(s)

Why it was a resounding success

A good summary. But did the lights stay on?