Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Palestinian-Syrian refugee opens Iraq’s first cat and dog hotel I wonder how many English would like this. Dozens of migrants killed as boats sinks off Syrian coast Good that ‘killed’, not ‘died’, has been used in the headline.

I like d’Eramo. “ while we pursue such extravagant schemes, we are simultaneously condemning this small, singular, fabulous planet of ours to destruction.” Exploiting the cosmos

  Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier of the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers' enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this apparatus and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others. ―  Simone Weil

Thrashed for theorising

 

 

“Could we say … that the prioritization of form is detrimental—almost hostile—to the recollection of context? If we did, we would not be the first. Indeed, formal analysis has often been taken as an anti-political distraction or bourgeois salve for psyches incapable of grasping larger, more worldly contradictions: the small, beautiful thing has always been pitted by critical voices against the forgotten social reality. Still, it seems important to note that form is able to reduce and disarm our awareness of context only because awareness of context is so difficult to maintain; it depends on the comprehension of something intangible and hulking in the background, of that which necessarily exists outside the lines. And the rub: any overarching network of conditions—but especially those of global capitalism—is one we ourselves are implicated in and shaped by. We live and move in the same context that produces the forms we espy. No wonder we would rather see the form by itself. Isolated, i...

“We paid the price twice” for Bashir’s dictatorship, says Amjed Farid, the opposition activist. “We got rid of the tyrant who was supporting terror, through a popular revolution that we paid for with our blood. And now we are paying the price for this tyrant, even though we were his first victims.” “Is this justice?”

The violence in Leicester Related The forsaken ones

Context: The revolution of 1905-1911, the Anglo-Russian active opposition to the revolution, the abdication of a shah and ascendance of another, reactionaries and conservatives continued to promote royalism and the execution of one of them–Fazlullah Nuri*.  “My countrymen I loathe and execrate,   My country is the object of my hate!   I represent the Monarch wise and great,   Who to my hands commits the nation’s fate!   ‘Tis time for breakfast. Put this business through!   Who bids? Who bids? Come Sir, a bid from you!” Quoted in E. G. Browne’s The Press and Poetry of Modern Iran , 1914, Cambridge University Press  * Nuri “was hanged in his turban and cloak, an eloquent tableau of clerical authority subordinated to  profane law. It is a telling commentary on the spread of constitutional ideas that the sentence was endorsed by many of the senior ulema of Iraq, as well as Nuri’s own son, Mahdi, who ‘stood at the foot of the g...

Cancelling the future Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life Related Capitalist Realism - Is There no Alternative?

  وأَنتَ تُعِدُّ فطورك ’ فكِّرْ بغيركَ [ لا تَنْسَ قُوتَ الحمامْ ] وأَنتَ تخوضُ حروبكَ، فكِّر بغيركَ  [لا تَنْسَ مَنْ يطلبون السلامْ] وأَنتَ تُسدِّدُ فاتورةَ الماء، فكِّر بغيركَ [مَنْ يرضَعُون الغمامْ] وأَنتَ تعودُ إلى البيت، بيتِكَ، فكِّرْ بغيركَ [ لا تنس شعب الخيامْ] وأَنت تنام وتُحصي الكواكبَ، فكِّرْ بغيركَ [ ثَمَّةَ مَنْ لم يجد حيّزاً للمنام] وأَنتَ تحرِّرُ نفسك بالاستعارات، فكِّرْ بغيركَ [ مَنْ فَقَدُوا حَقَّهم في الكلامْ] وأَنتَ تفكِّر بالآخرين البعيدين، فكِّرْ بنفسكَ [ قُلْ: ليتني شمعةٌ في الظلامْ]

An Extinction Rebellion that cannot rebel. A Trade Union Congress that bows in front of class rule. An excellent article by Chris Hedges Related