Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

A good report by Anand Gopal

An interview with Ussama Makdisi

The Telegraph calls it an invasion , the BBC calls it a coup . A 20-years war, an election organised under occupation and during bloodshed, with a president elected by 923,000 votes out of 9.7 million registered votes out of a population of 30 million. No, it is not a coup. The Taliban were overthrown by a US-led invasion and then Taliban won that war. There was no government or Afghan army to speak of. It was a regime kept alive by the American forces ruling over about 30% of the population. But those who always scream about fair and democratic elections, do not care about facts. Ironically, the BBC is one of the proponents of ‘Fact-check’. 

“The very idea of more humane war may seem a contradiction in terms. The US’s conflicts abroad remain brutal and deadly, but what’s frightening about them is not just the violence they inflict. This new kind of American war is revealing that the most elemental face of war is not death. Instead, it is control by domination and surveillance. Humanitarian and military lawyers bickered around how much wartime humanity was going to be enough. They tacitly agreed not to fight over the war itself. The campaign to seek more humane war did not challenge the enterprise of war itself. Through the presidencies of Bush, Obama and Trump, the US could take strides to keep its wars humane. But it did so while entrenching its globalised militarism, as one anti-war candidate then another became an endless-war president. And now one more, alas, seems a prisoner of the script.” Note that Samuel Moyn uses the term terrorism to refer to terrorism carried out by non-state agents, but he never applies the te...

From a response by Edward Said and Oleg Grabar to Bernard Lewis : Then there is the meaning of  thawra , the common modern Arabic term for revolution, and Lewis’s description of it. His discussion of  thawra inc identally is one of two occasions in an enormous article in which Lewis reveals that he is writing not just as a defender of Orientalism, but as someone I had criticized in two of my books. His declaration of interest, as so often, is extremely discreet. With bogus learning, Lewis parades meanings of  thawra  acquired from a superifical survey of sources. His Orientalist account of the word has very little to do with what it means in contemporary usage; thus his method of proceeding is peculiar to a field that studiously places a greater value on what European scholars thought and said than on what users of a language thought and said. One of his examples is that  thawra  is associated with the act of rising up, after which Lewis affixes to “rising ...

Can inequality be blamed on the Agricultural Revolution? Related Against the Grain

I am at the end of this book. I recommend it. You just need some updated figures while you are reading. The Globalisation of Production, Super-Exploitation and the Crisis of Capitalism Two major factors cause capitalist crisis: declining profitability and overproduction. I am not convinced that the latter is a major factor. The problem is not that capitalism produces too much, but that what it is produced is not provided to the global population. Half of the world population is unable to buy what is produced or buys too little of what is produced because it is too poor. That means that lack of investment in large swathes of the world–Latin America and South Africa, Africa, parts of the Middle East and Asia–unemployment, precarity, etc. deprives half of the world from getting access to what is produced. Those who produce get little or almost nothing from what they produce.  According to the WHO “around 45% of deaths among children under 5 years of age are linked to undernutrition. ...

 

It is mostly from a British journalist perspective An account to refresh our memory

As Kabul fell to the Taliban, so did Bagram prison. As a former prisoner of this place, it’s hard to describe the emotions I felt at hearing this news. The Times  describes  Bagram as “the scene of some of the darkest episodes of the US-led occupation”. But to me, it’s the scene of countless unresolved war crimes, and I’m an eyewitness. It is regarding those crimes that I gave  testimony  to the International Criminal Court, and for which the US government threatened to prosecute its members. Former Bagram and Guantanamo prisoner Moazzam Begg on what he saw Related Australian elite troops killed Afghan civilians [for practice]