Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Denying the inevitable

Law man

“Several decades after its exhaustion, the communist experience does not need to be defended, idealized, or demonized. It deserves to be critically understood as a whole, as a dialectical totality shaped by internal tensions and contradictions, presenting multiple dimensions in a vast spectrum of shades, from redemptive élans to totalitarian violence, from participatory democracy and collective deliberation to blind oppression and mass extermination, from the most utopian imagination to the most bureaucratic domination — sometimes shifting from one to the other in a short span of time. Like many other “isms” of our political and philosophical lexicon, communism is a polysemic and ultimately “ambiguous” word...” Coming to terms with communist history

“When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.” “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.” – Desmond Tutu “As with Martin Luther King, many of the same political leaders commemorating Tutu today would have been unlikely to mention him a day earlier, lest Tutu take the opportunity to speak his mind.  This is certainly why he was not invited to commemorate his friend and comrade, Nelson Mandela, at Mandela’s funeral eight years ago. Like King and so many others, we can be sure that all the praises of Desmond Tutu as the great moral compass of the world will be made safely, after he’s dead.  Before then would have been much too dangerous, and he was best ignored until...

The teenager’s poem that reveals a cruel reality

 

Note: A British nation has never existed. A sharp critique of David Edgerton’s Britain

The pink left has also gained ‘power’ in Chile. Unlike Honduras , the country is the richest in Latin America. Will Boric’s government fare better than the previous leftist governments in the region? I doubt it . “It  is worth remembering the  experiences of Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain . Both parties, with some of the same ideological foundations as the Broad Front in Chile, promised an end to neoliberalism via elections. But once they were in government, they implemented many of the  neoliberal policies demanded by the institutions of the ruling class. 

Every year the corporate media reminds us again and again of Tiananmen Square massacre. How many times have we seen the same reporting and commemoration of Egypt’s Rab’a Square? It is probable that the number of those killed in the latter in the span of 12 hours was more than what the Chinese government forces killed between 3 and 4 of June. This is corroborated by Human Rights Watch itself not a leftist organisation or Chinese regime sympathisers. Most estimates cited on Wikipedia give a figure very similar to the number killed in Rab’a Square. Egypt is an ‘ally’. The regime is not a threat to ‘us’. Thus the hypocrisy.

‘Arab Spring’

A good piece! I disagree with the use of ‘post-socialism/communism though. Morris misses to include capitalism in Russia with the global political economy. “We  should  view Russia as just another ‘normal’ country, just not in the optimistic sense  Daniel Treisman and Andrei Shleifer (2005)  predicted: a middle-income country facing typical developmental challenges. Instead, I would contend that Russia is ‘normal’ in ways that reflect its peripheral-as-vanguard authoritarian neoliberalism. Its characteristics are the dominant politics of “austerity” (the phobia of fiscal expansion, a continuously residualizing social state) accompanied by the other disciplining factor of real incomes falling over protracted time periods; limited social mobility and the privatizing of educational opportunity leading to a small plutocratic class or caste; the expansion of indebtedness and precarity in the population; social reproduction as largely responsibilized and pri...

If only Assange had been Navalny

“French politicians spend little time discussing socio-economic issues. The most polarised debates revolve around  culture wars . In France, they focus on immigration, Islam and its alleged threat to  laïcité  and French republican values, culture and education. There are constant attacks on ‘ Islamo-Leftism ’ and ‘ woke culture ’. These strengthen the hand of the far Right, which traditionally thrives on those issues.” A creature of the ‘French establishment’

A French invention Une invention française اختراع استعماري فرنسي

“The question of the origins of inequality in human evolution and history matters a great deal for how we try to change the world. But Graeber and Wengrow want change without attending to equality and class, and they are hostile to environmental and ecological explanations. These flaws have conservative implications.” Strange how the reviewers categorised Jared Diamond as an evolutionary psychologist. A review

“Il y a d’étranges possibilités dans chaque homme. Le présent serait plein de tous les avenirs, si le passé n’y projetait déjà une histoire. Mais, hélas ! un unique passé propose un unique avenir – le projette devant nous, comme un pont infini sur l’espace. On n’est sûr de ne jamais faire que ce que l’on est incapable de comprendre. Comprendre, c’est se sentir capable de faire. ASSUMER LE PLUS POSSIBLE D’HUMANITÉ, voilà la bonne formule.” André Gide, Les Nourritures Terrestres , 1897, pp. 13-14 “ There are strange possibilities in every man. The present would be pregnant with all futures if the past had not already projected its history into it. But, alas, a one and only past can offer us no more than a one and only future–which it casts before us like an infinite bridge over space.  We can only be sure of never doing what we are incapable of understanding. To understand is to feel capable of doing.  ASSUME AS MUCH HUMANITY AS POSSIBLE–let this be your motto.”

In solidarity

Israel’s ‘security’ comes first

A MERIP’s online event 

An article behind a pay wall , but you still get the gist. “Over the last 50 years, France has sold arms to some of the world’s most brutally repressive governments. In the 1970s its customer list included South Africa’s apartheid regime, Argentina’s junta, Franco’s Spain and the Greek colonels. Today its preferred clients are Saudi Arabia and Abdel Fattah al-Sissi’s Egypt.”

Persecuted Muslims in a far away country not in the heart of Europe. Are they important? Do they serve a political or a geopolitical purpose? Have they been involved in a violent attack on ‘us’? Rohingya sue Facebook for $150bn over Myanmar hate speech

“ Loin du grand complot imaginé par France Inter , la crise biélorusse s’explique surtout par la loi, plus élémentaire, de l’effet boomerang. En matière d’immigration, l’Union européenne ne cesse de pratiquer le chantage et le marchandage. Elle subordonne son «   aide au développement   » à la signature d’accords de «   réadmission   », qui lui permettront d’expulser plus facilement les clandestins. Elle menace de ne plus accorder de visas aux États qui renâclent. Elle paie la Turquie pour retenir les quatre millions de réfugiés du Proche-Orient, le Maroc pour protéger Ceuta et Melilla, la Libye pour bloquer les départs en Méditerranée, le Niger pour cadenasser la voie saharienne.”

 صراع داخل حزب العمال

“Like others before me, I am honest about it: Yes, I oppress French citizens, but for ‘France’s interests’ – French capital and geopolitics interests – I also engage in crimes with others.” The same soft hand smile that destroys migrant camps and drive the vulnerable into the sea.  French voters: “It is Russian; it is Belarus; it is the smugglers. We will vote for you to stop Le Pen.” There are bad authoritarian regimes, e.g. Alexander Lukashenko’s, and there are good ones. Are there any principled positions? No. As a French woman I knew told me once in 2000: “seulement les ânes ne changent pas ses principes [only donkeys do no change their principles]. The actions and positions of French imperialism partly dictated by  its dependence on oil . Today France get around 20% of its oil from Saudi Arabia thus its special relationship with the Middle Eastern monarchy and it gets about 12% of oil from Nigeria thus its interest in ‘stabilising’ the Sahel. In fact, around a third of o...

“The truth of the matter is, it’s all within our wheelhouse and nobody has to be punished. No one’s standard of living would change. Nothing would fundamentally change.” –Joe Biden The failure of neoliberalism has undercut U.S. capitalism’s ability to compete within—and by extension dominate—the world system. That is why there is broad support among business elites and the political establishment for Biden’s turn and why it is a dangerous illusion to present it as a concession to the Left. His imperialist Keynesianism is designed to re-cohere a deeply divided nation, rehabilitate the foundations of U.S. capitalism, and reassert U.S. hegemony over the world state system—especially against China, its rising imperial rival. Biden’s proposed expansion of welfare state spending will do little to mitigate the profound social inequalities of the U.S. As Susan Watkins argues, if enacted the plans will not even bring the U.S. welfare state up to the current level of those in Europe, which thems...

The extension of vaccine privilege outside the West is not an act of charity

Violence against the unwanted, the unwashed, the invaders, the illegal

A good summary by Avi Shlaim . He skipped the origin of Hamas though, particularly the role of Israel in its creation.

  نظرية في الإخضاع

Webinar: a conversation with the authors of the dossier The Arab Uprisings - A Decade of Struggle

“The UN has forecast that Afghanistan’s gross domestic product will contract 20 per cent within a year following the Taliban’s takeover of the country, representing one of the worst economic meltdowns in history. Such a contraction took five years of civil war in Syria to achieve, and was expected to worsen to 30 per cent next year. The UNDP said aid accounted for as much as 80 per cent of budget expenditure. The UNDP estimates that the loss of female employment could cost up to $1bn, or 5 per cent, of GDP, and slash productivity.” Source: the Financial  Times

Can a poor country establish democratic socialism? Would imperialism, especially American imperialism, tolerate it at its backyard? Is Honduras an alternative to the Latin America’s ‘pink tide’ or is it just a continuation of changing horses between the right and the left? One of the good outcomes in Honduras is a confirmation that the question is not about more ‘women’ occupying high positions in state and government, but about the colour, the ideology and socio-economic programme of the ‘woman’. “I believe firmly that the democratic socialism I propose is the solution to pull Honduras out of the abyss we have been buried in by neoliberalism, a narco-dictator and corruption.”  – Xiomara Castro

‘What the Belarus regime is doing is basically human trafficking,’ a French government spokesman said on 10 November. A few days later, interior minister Gérald Darmanin ordered French police to dismantle the migrant camps outside Calais and Grande-Synthe; they slashed the tents with knives. And on 24 November, 27 migrants drowned trying to cross the Channel. Is that a crime difficult to solve?

A very good piece! UK Brexiteers’ libertarian goal

Bring class struggle back in

Dunkirk’s camps