Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Iranian rock and heavy metal

“Far from the world being swept by a wave of rationality, historical accuracy and universality, the very turmoil produced by [capitalist] globalisation, by the collapse and discrediting of the dominant radical ideologies of the twentieth century, of left and right, and by a world where violence in many unexpected forms is prevalent, has led to a strengthening of myth and emotional claims. We are aware, through the work of sociologists and students of nationalism, of the role of such myths in mobilising people and enabling them to make sense of their complex and often bewildering lives. Hence we can recognise that the more rapidly the world changes, and the more interaction and conflict there are between peoples, the more potent these ideas become.”  –Fred Halliday,  100 Myths About the Middle East , 2005, pp. 14-15 Some of the myths  “ The Middle East is, in some fundamental way, ‘different’ from the rest of the world and has to be understood in terms distinct from other ...

 شركاء في الاضطهاد

An alternative paradigm of interpretation. Very engaging! The mythological machine in the great civil war

This cliché of invoking the ‘international community’ is again not helpful. The authors ignore what the ‘international community’ – the big and regional powers’ stands towards Egypt and the Yemen war, for example.  The Sudanese must rely on themselves. They trace back to Al-Bashir era Related Deans suspend studies indefinitely

Richard Seymour: Owing to the increasing technological difficulties and commercial disadvantages associated with fossil fuels, Tooze worries that I am too “sanguine” about the chances of “green modernisation”. I do argue that the far-sighted members of the ruling class might react to this crisis by accelerating “the transition to renewables” with “more energy-efficient buildings, transport and supply chains” and even competition “over who transitions fastest”, resulting in trade wars over the control of the rare metals needed to make solar panels. What Adam Tooze gets wrong about capitalism and climate change

  “[H]istory is made in such a way that the final result always arises from conflicts between many individual wills, of which each in turn has been made what it is by a host of particular conditions of life. Thus there are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant — the historical event. This may again itself be viewed as the product of a power which works as a whole  unconsciously  and without volition. For what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed. Thus history has proceeded hitherto in the manner of a natural process and is essentially subject to the same laws of motion. But from the fact that the wills of individuals — each of whom desires what he is impelled to by his physical constitution and external, in the last resort economic, circumstances (either his own personal circumstances or those of society in general) — do not attain w...

 A very good approach! And in case one has not realised yet that the IMF and the World Bank impose policies with “criminal outcomes” – the words are Eric Toussaint’s and Damien Millet’s – this is a must read . The difference is that the crime here is part of a long destruction of nature for profit and capital accumulation. Related Crimes Against Nature Building in wood

Alaa Abd el-Fattah

  A liberal view. There no global economic-system and it’s crises, there is no uneven development, migration and capital, there is no class, there is no demographic pressures, especially of the youth, no lack of prospects for many, no precarity … Only abstract concepts such as ‘inequality’ and ‘lack of democracy’, without even being able to define what democracy or real democracy is. Asked what defines “real democracy,” Burke admitted it was somewhat subjective: “One person’s democracy is another person’s autocracy.”

The pandemic slump has raised poverty across the globe