Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The claim was  global expansion and harmonious development of the productive forces and resources of the world .  The 2008-09 crisis, the Arab uprisings and social movements in the West itself, wars and civil wars, migration, fall in living standards for many people, environmental degradation, rise of neofascism and more racism, increase in inequality and corruption, the handling of the pandemic and vaccine apartheid … has exposed what ‘globalisation’ has really meant.

A short story by Zakaria Tamer

A short story by Zakaria Tamer

Since nudity is not a central topic in the film, as the writers state, why is the headline Nudity Overshadows Betrayal in ‘Huda’s Salon’ ? Nudity overshadows betrayal is in the Arab critics reviews of the film, not in the film itself.

“I see my granddaughters running away in panic,” Guterres said. “The war is an absurdity in the 21st century. The war is evil. There is no way a war can be acceptable in the 21st century.” One wonders what subject(s) Antonio Guterres studied at university. Political economy, security, war studies, international relations? None of  these subjects describes war as an absurdity. In fact, he was a student in engineering and telecommunications, not in the humanities. Apparently, the Portuguese Socialist Party never educated him in the subject of war or political economy. Leaving aside that UN secretary general is fundamentally wrong about what war is, has he ever said that what has happened in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Ethiopia, for instance, are ‘absurdities’ in the 21st century? Isn’t he another Westerner shocked by a war in a ‘civilised’ country/region using different measurements and criteria?

The French who voted for Macron and those before him, who dined, wined, and had a laugh with Egypt’s dictators from Mubarak to Sisi, did they have the complicity of the people they voted for and their own in mind or only their salaries, the cost of living and similar issues? Eyewitness: journalist and activist Solafa Magdy

Contrary to what the headline states, Taiwan, Japan, Australia, South Korea and India are not competing for supremacy. They are subordinate states to the U.S. The latter has ‘supremacy’. And because the U.S. cannot control everything everywhere, forges alliances with subordinate states to protect the flow and accumulation of capital.  ‘The countries competing for supremacy’

The digital age is destroying us

A free ebook  Direct Action and the Future of the Global Climate Movement

–Ishmahil Blagrove, Facebook, 22 April 2022

This is a very good novel. Extracts from The Sympathiser by Viet Thanh Nguyen The month in question was April, the cruelest month. It was the month in which a war that had run on for a very long time would lose its limbs, as is the way of wars. It was a month that meant everything to all the people in our small part of the world and nothing to most people in the rest of the world. In this gloomiest of Aprils, faced with this question of what should be done, the general who always found something to do could no longer do so. A man who had faith in the mission civilisatrice and the American Way was at last bitten by the bug of disbelief. In those days, when the CIA was the OSS, Ho Chi Minh looked to them for help in fighting the French. He even quoted America’s Founding Fathers in his declaration of our country’s independence.  In this jackfruit republic that served as a franchise of the United States, Americans expected me to be like those millions who spoke no English, pidgin Engl...

Movies were America’s way of softening up the rest of the world, Hollywood relentlessly assaulting the mental defenses of audiences with the hit, the smash, the spectacle, the blockbuster, and, yes, even the box office bomb. It mattered not what story these audiences watched. The point was that it was the American story they watched and loved, up until the day that they themselves might be bombed by the planes they had seen in American movies. – Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathiser , 2015 ed., chapter 11

   ارفضوا دعاية صندوق النقد الدولي

[Raphael] Lemkin “ breaks genocide into three types : physical, biological, and cultural. He recognized that the events and processes of genocide, which culminate in the loss of a national, racial, religious, ethnic, or political group in whole or in part, could manifest in multiple ways, for different reasons, and include multiple modes of destruction of the group and its members besides the loss of life. Each type manifests differently, but the end result of each is the same: an irreparable and tragic loss of a culture that carries further implications of their shifted future.  The gruesome and violent physical forms of genocide raise the hairs on our sensibilities, and the biological forms tug on our heartstrings with broken families and mistreatment of women, yet both of these horrible forms of genocide occur as events making them both identifiable with an end. The process of cultural genocide, the grouping left out of the legal definition, is a large scale deletion of a cultur...

I don’t like Tariq Ali, but the topic is one of my favourites. In his Preface, Tariq Ali makes clear that he does not support toppling Churchill’s statues wherever they stand—but rather, a deeper battle on the field of historiography, against a consensus that “appears hegemonic but remains vulnerable.” This is the context in which  Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes  is written—and in which, if I’m any judge at all, it succeeds admirably. Timidity of a ‘radical’. What about opposing all statues, be it of Churchill, Thatcher, Lenin or Chavez? A review of Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes

‘There are common features between historical fascism and the far right’

“ In this perverse upending of the very meaning of decolonization, to decolonize France is to rid the nation of the immigrants who are “colonizing” it . Paradoxically, the most vocal advocates of decolonization today are not formerly colonized subjects, but the nativist guardians of the borders of France against the purported invasion of immigrants.”

An alternative to monetary or wage policy

A new history of revolution

Although the articles requires a subscription, what is accessible is already most of it. The Need to Mount Long-Term Resistance to Totalitarianism and Ethnonationalist Chauvinism

A leftist detaching the economy and sociology from politics and geopolitics. Is this an approach to counter the liberal and conservative approaches? Maintaining or expanding U.S. hegemony. Yes, but what does that hegemony consist of? What does drive it? Yet it is still worth a read.

Can art, and the differences in opinion on it between the Arab and the Western worlds, really explain the violence between the two sides? Are not these attitudes, at odds with one another regarding the depiction of the Prophet, merely a pretext for conflicts with other underlying motivations? Those who endeavor to incite this violence, do they use religion, the Prophet, and images, among other things, to cement their dominance over their local environments? Does successful globalization, wherever the case may be, not exacerbate the pressure on cultural, artistic, and ideological boundaries to adapt and expand? And, in turn, does this pressure not incite “adversarial” and “miserable” and “desperate” situations?  Examining the Past to Understand Present Controversy

The new frontiers of control Related UK prison population third highest in Europe

 

 By the Syrian Lamis Kan

Although today there are almost 14000 known nuclear warheads - less than the 50000+ in 1986  - the ’colossal threat is still hanging over our heads’. “Three hundred and eighty million years passed between the appearance of visible life and the moment a butterfly learnt to fly... and then another 180 million years before nature produced a rose, with no other purpose than being beautiful. It took another four geological eras for human beings — unlike our Pithecanthropus great-grandparents — to learn to sing better than birds, and even be able to die of love. It is by no means glorious that men’s talents have ensured, in the golden age of science, that such a colossal, multi-millennial process could return to its original nothingness with the push of a button.” A beautiful depiction by one of the greatest modern novelists

Arrived in LA seeking fame and fortune but ended up being ground down

Thirty-three years after the fall of the Berlin wall, bloc-thinking is back. The democratic “West” against the authoritarian “East”. Authoritarian alliances in the “West” recede into the backdrop, critique of liberal democracy’s chronic shadows grow silent. States recently accused of threatening democracy and the rule of law are embraced. They belong once again to the democratic “We”. With the war in Ukraine, authoritarianism in the “West” is externalized to the Putin regime. But authoritarian populism has been growing in Europe for a long time in the midst of liberal democracy, in states that claim to be illiberal, but not only there. The pandemic has intensified this neoliberal-authoritarian transformation. When uncertainties increase and bring about the compulsion to control, all sides take recourse to identitarianisms, as if there had never been a critique of it. If we want to understand democracy in a fundamentally different way — without the nation, without the people, without bl...

“ There was no reference to apartheid , and no reference, even, to a fifty-five-year-long illegal occupation. Worse, he drew on racist anti-Palestinian tropes about Israel having been founded in an empty land, in wilful denial of the Nakba. To add insult, all of this was delivered in the presence of Tzipi Hotovely, the Israeli ambassador, with her own  track record  of egregious racism—including opposing Jews marrying Palestinians.”

“Sir Keir’s record shows his evolution into an unabashed authoritarian. As a young lawyer from a Labour-voting family, he dedicated significant time and energy to liberal causes, using his natural diligence to win a number of worthy cases against powerful interests […] his identification with socialists and environmentalists was always secondary to his ambition and the conformist reflexes that came with it.” A Journey to the Right

 

Global capitalism is what it is not only because it is global but, above all, because it is capitalist. The problems we associate with globalization - the social injustices, the growing gap between rich and poor, ‘democratic deficits’, ecological degradation, and so on - are there not simply because the economy is ‘global’, or because global corporations are uniquely vicious, or even because they are exceptionally powerful. These problems exist because capitalism, whether national or global, is driven by certain systemic imperatives, the imperatives of competition, profit-maximization and accumulation, which inevitably require putting ‘exchange-value’ before ‘use-value’ and profit before people. Even the most benign or ‘responsible’ corporation cannot escape these compulsions but must follow the laws of the market in order to survive - which inevitably means putting profit above all other considerations, with all its wasteful and destructive consequences. These compulsions also require...

“ We remain a profession with amongst the highest number of unpaid working hours, and we are still well above the international average for hours worked by teachers. This is simply unsustainable and can only lead to burnout.” Unmanageable workloads, stress and level of trust in teachers are key factors

We should add the international economic situation to this good analysis. Heading for victory, despite dismal record

I think this is worth a read. Islam after the West

“The last Muslim intellectual”

Through its very existence, the apocalypse locked in the death silos of the richest countries reduces our hopes of a better life for mankind. Let it be known with what barbaric inventions, and for what petty purposes, they wiped out the life of the universe. –Gabriel García Márquez, 1987

“A labour movement United on Ukraine”

 

What we can do is raise the demand for peace and for the British government to get off its bellicose high horse. Tory machismo at the expense of other people’s lives needs to be replaced by serious support for a diplomatic end to the war. Even President Zelensky knows the danger. There is a Nato camp, he said last week, which doesn’t “mind a long war because it would mean exhausting Russia, even if this means the demise of Ukraine and comes at the cost of Ukrainian lives.”

When they commit them, they are war crimes . When we do it, it’s fighting insurgents and terrorists; it’s a mistake or they were rogue soldiers involved; or it’s a collateral damage. I think the article concludes with a utopian vision in the current international balance of powers and the prospects of more wars and instability. Who is going to make the ICC function impartially in every war?  One needs to question the existing regimes East and West and interconnect wars with major social and political-economic issues engulfing the world. Listing war crimes committed by ‘liberal democrats’ and authoritarians, does not go beyond recalling events that have become common knowledge and exposing hypocrisy and double standards that many ordinary people have already noticed. More than ever the type of journalism required today is radical, ‘extremist’ journalism in a very extremist world; as Mark Mazower put it, we urgently need a journalism that is able to “ overcome  the frangmentatio...

While there is no organized Muslim community in France, Muslims tend to mostly cast a left-wing vote. To me, such a vote cannot be qualified as a religious vote, but should rather be understood as a social vote.” A look at recent elections

I have lived in this area for 18 years. I have never seen ‘love’ extended to Iraqis and Afghanis adorning shop windows in London, for example.

A reply to Stathis Kouvelakis

Greek railroad workers as an example

I disagree with Callinicos’s position on Syriza though. It sounds an ultra-leftist stance for me, and he does not specify when Syriza should have been opposed before the capitulation of Alexis Tsipras or after. A reply to Paul Mason

“Even if I’m cut to pieces, the people won’t let your British lackey rule. You slaves!” The Times ran a series, likely drafted by the notorious academic spy Ann Lambton, describing the oil nationalisation crisis as a product of the faulty “Persian character", while “the horse-faced Oriental” Mosaddegh was a hysterical symptom of an old feudal order that couldn’t take responsibility for its own shortcomings. Can the prime minister, a seasoned politician three decades his senior, not see the British themselves are ruthless? That they are trying to starve the people into submission with sanctions? That they provoke the religious fundamentalists who shot him, leaving him with this shattered leg, forever leaning on a cane to just get across a room? In the service of US and British geopolitical interests

 Her awful, awful career

US chief executives are on track to reap record rewards this year, raising the prospect of fresh clashes with investors and employees as the gap between their earnings and those of their staff widens to a historic multiple in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.  For the 280 S&P 500 companies that have reported figures this year, the median chief executive’s pay has jumped to a record $14.2mn for 2021, up from $13.5mn in 2020, according to ISS Corporate Solutions, a data provider.  Equilar, another data company that tracks chief executive rewards at the biggest companies by revenue, said the median among 196 companies that have reported this year has rocketed 20 per cent to $14.3mn, after having dipped to $12mn in 2020. Among the largest executive pay packages to have been announced were David Zaslav’s $247mn at Discovery, Pat Gelsinger’s $178.6mn at Intel and Andy Jassy’s $212.7mn at Amazon — which was made public the same day workers in New York voted to form Amazon’s firs...

What are the historical links?

“Neither the respectable left nor the hardline liberals can explain how spiralling ‘punishments’ are meant to bring a quick end to the war, still less a lasting peace.”  Invasion of Ukraine: more on hypocrisy, warmongering and the innocent abroad

Definition of ‘globalisation’ aside, it is very interesting to follow the arguments of liberals. BlackRock chief executive Larry Fink’s proclamation last week stated that “the Russian invasion of Ukraine has put an end to the globalisation we have experienced over the last three decades”. As he put it, the war marks “a turning point in the world order of geopolitics, macroeconomic trends, and capital markets”. Rana Foroohar of the Financial Times argues that  “we won’t see a 1930s-style meltdown but rather a new kind of regionalisation that will replace what came before. I’ve been arguing for some time that regional trading blocs are the only way forward given the mercantilist reality of China’s current system, which is simply incompatible with the rules of the World Trade Organization. I think the big question is whether we move towards a bipolar system, with the US and Europe (and whichever OECD nations decide to come along with them) creating some new structures, particularly f...

Deterring the U.S. Related For nearly 30 years, Russia has been enabling China’s rise as a military power. Russian weapons producers have supplied the People’s Liberation Army with missiles, helicopters and advanced fighter jets to the tune of an average of $1.5bn a year.  Now, the tide is turning. As reported by the Financial Times this month, Russia has requested military assistance from China to maintain its invasion of Ukraine. According to intelligence the US shared with allies, Russia requested supplies including surface-to-air missiles, drones, intelligence-related equipment and armoured and logistics vehicles. Sipri’s arms transfers database, which tracks deals from 1950 to 2021, records scores of Russian weapons exports to China, with none going the other way. But China is clearly outgrowing its traditional reliance on Russian for supplies of advanced arms. China spent more than three times as much on defence as Russia in 2020. Source: Financial Times Imperialist Keynesian...