Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Although Challand is right to address the use of cultural activities in supporting political messages and mentions some of the positive achievements of the period, he is insufficiently critical of the weaknesses of the programs and policies militants proposed for the future. Revolutionary leadership was missing: the negative slogan of getting rid of the existing political system required a positive vision about the kind of society and polity with which demonstrators wanted to replace it. As many of Challand’s ideological references are Marxist, the absence of any discussion of the major issue of the movements’ lack of alternative economic programs, and in particular the fact that there was no explicit challenge to dominant neoliberal economic policies, is surprising. In other words, there is little reference to the economic structures that determine political choices and constrain outcomes. Helen Lackner reviews Violence and Representation in the Arab Uprising Related The Arab Thermido...

“Any supposed peace dividend from the end of the Cold War, always more talked about than experienced by voters in the UK, was now over, Shapps argued. We are not in a ‘post-war world’ but a ‘pre-war world’, the defence secretary told his listeners.”  “In a phrase worthy of Dr Strangelove, he said that we cannot assume that ‘the strategy of mutually assured destruction that stopped wars in the past will stop them in the future’. “The majority of its [Britain’s] citizens have had more sense than to approve the imperial follies of the post-Cold War hot wars.”  I am not sure about that. Rees must provide evidence. John Rees is from the Socialist Workers Party. Publishing on the Middle East Eye means Rees and MEE have to replace the term imperialist with ‘imperial’ and neocolonial power with ‘post-colonial power’ .

No surprise here, but good for the record. Complicity in crimes comes in different colours and shades. The Intercept: A comprehensive new analysis by The Intercept has revealed the full extent of the pro-Israel bias in three of America’s most influential newspapers: the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. These disturbing findings show directly how mainstream media coverage dehumanizes Palestinians and devalues their lives.  For instance, during the first six weeks of the war, even as Palestinian deaths far outpaced Israeli ones, Israelis were mentioned at a rate of  16 times more  per death than Palestinians. Highly emotive terms like “slaughter” and “massacre” were used 60 times more often to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians. A similar analysis of cable news coverage by the same authors found an even more extreme anti-Palestinian bias. The U.S. news media’s refusal to recognize Palestinian humanity is directly abetting the...

It is a pattern. “Counter-terrorism training provided by American mercenaries to Emirati officers in Yemen has been used to train locals who can work under a lower profile - sparking a major uptick in political assassinations, a whistleblower told BBC Arabic Investigations.” Here only some examples: US trained butchers of Timor, Indonesia Human rights violations by the CIA Learning to kill by proxy The crimes of the US in Indonesia, Afghanistan and Guatemala The School of the Americas – a report From El Salvador to Iraq: Washington man behind brutal police squads Israel? It would be anti-Semitic to say that it has carried out political assassinations. Rogue State   by William Bloom

A summary by Middle East Eye

In a nutshell, the climate  negotiations “are predicated on a contradiction: the task of agreeing a programme of radical global economic transformation is allocated to those – including, this year, a record 2,500 fossil fuel industry representatives – who stand to lose the most from disrupting the current economic model. For the most influential in these negotiations – the titans of finance, energy giants, and the wealthy states who protect their interests – the solution to this dilemma is to find a way to transform the foundations of global capitalism, from energy to agriculture and from transport to industry, while preserving everything else about its social relations and overarching dynamics. Theirs is necessarily a future in which the transition to a decarbonised and ecologically sustainable economy implies no trade-off with continued growth, profit maximisation, private ownership or accumulation: in short, from fossil capitalism to a green capitalism. For some, green capi...

A poem by Kos Kostmayer

Emmeline Pankhurst, probably the most venerated in the mainstream British media, defended the presence and reach of the British Empire:  Some talk about the Empire and Imperialism as if it were something to decry and something to be ashamed of. [I]t is a great thing to be the inheritors of an Empire like ours ... great in territory, great in potential wealth. ... If we can only realise and use that potential wealth we can destroy thereby poverty, we can remove and destroy ignorance. For years she travelled around England and North America, rallying support for the British Empire and warning audiences about the dangers of Bolshevism. —Quoted in Purvis, June, Emmeline Pankhurst: A Biography , London 2002, p. 312 Why is a London School of Economics’s building named after her?   There is a Memorial of her in Victoria Tower Gardens, south of Victoria Tower at the southwest corner of the Palace of Westminster

“ Late modernity is a capitalist modernity , which, as a permanent process of rationalisation and secularisation, constantly gives rise to what  Georg Lukács  called ‘transcendental homelessness’. Modern humans have lost any spiritual sense of meaning. For Lukács, reading novels was one way of dealing with this problem. One can immerse oneself in literature and imagine a different world. Today, the growing numbers of esoteric communities and other forms of spiritual sense-making indicate there is considerable demand for transcendence. The rise of libertarian authoritarianism is also a consequence of the weakness of the left and social movements. It has often lost its anti-establishment appeal. Many people no longer see the left as sufficiently critical of the state and the media. It is no longer seen as a legitimate representative of a collective criticism of power and a productive counter-knowledge. Social movements such as  feminism  and the anti-nuclear movement h...