Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Some critique of Mann’s concepts and analysis “The extensive mass murders of Communist states are problematic,” argues  scholar Martin Shaw  in his review of Mann’s  The Dark Side of Democracy . “Mann plausibly describes many of them as  classicide , because their targets were social classes, and explains them as ‘mistaken revolutionary projects’ rather than as ethnic conflict. But he also offers the perversion of socialism as a class variant of the more common ethnic perversion of democracy: ‘socialist ideals of democracy also became perverted as the  demos  became entwined with the term  proletariat , the working class, creating pressures to cleanse other classes.’ Along with the perversion of national democracy, this was then a second ‘general way in which democratic ideals were transmuted into murderous cleansing.’ However[,] we may question whether the idea of the proletariat (working class) was really a moving force in the perversion of Soviet de...

Cleansing After 1945 Michael Mann I have shown that modernity generated two different conceptions of  democracy. First, North-Western European and white settler régimes had a pronounced sense of class conflict, and sought to institutionalize it. Thus they developed and deepened forms of liberal, not organic, democracy among themselves. But the white settlers developed an organic conception of their whole community as opposed to alien indigenous ‘others’. They practised severe forms of ethnic cleansing upon them, including the commission of genocide. Second, the different circumstances of Central, Eastern and Southern  Europe, meant that not class but ethnic stratification became the central political issue. Unlike classes, most ethnic or religious  communities are not necessarily interdependent. They can live in  their own cleansed communities, with their own organic state. They were increasingly doing so. In two distinct ways, th...

Why, at a time when,  according  to Oxfam, "more women and children are killed in Gaza by Israeli military than any other recent conflict in a single year", should Israel suddenly care about the fate of Iranian women ? At a time when the entire world is aghast and nauseated at the Israeli  savagery in Gaza  and the rest of  Palestine , and as the Israeli army – fully funded and equipped by the US, UK  and  Germany  – is acting like a mad beast attacking  Lebanon ,  Syria , and  Yemen , with repeated provocations against Iran, why would Israel turn to Nafisi and how she assembled, as she claims, a few young Iranian women to read Vladimir Nabokov's  pornographic novel  with them? 

In Defence of Barbarism:  Non-Whites Against the Empire

Myth 1: Trump put pressure on Netanyahu. That has been depicted by many as if it was him who arm-twisted the Israeli genocidal leader to put an end to the war. Myth 2: The depiction of the current truce as a victory for Hamas.  أسطورتان متعلقتان بوقف إطلاق النار في غزّة 

Contrasting reality

Leftist Organicism There was a leftist version, though the inter-war emergence of  organicism was slower and less thorough on the Left. The new USSR  quickly embraced the statism that pre-war socialist and especially  communist movements had denounced. 20 By September 1918, the  independence of the soviets, the unions and the law was almost gone, the Cheka secret police was into its first murders, ‘merciless extermination’ was declared to be the fate of the kulak class enemy, concentration camps were built and the ‘Red Terror’ had been formally inaugurated. Statism was seen more as political necessity than moral principle—unlike extreme rightism. Nonetheless, some Bolshevik language had begun to resemble fascist language. Trotsky made a famous speech with a decidedly fascist title: ‘Work, Discipline and Order Will Save the Soviet Socialist Republic’. He also sometimes praised paramilitary virtues: economic problems, he declared, had to be ‘stormed’ with ‘disciplined...