NM's blog

Just another Brit attacking a whole religion and all Muslims for the actions of a tiny minority. Another Brit who is now 'intellectually' not different from the far-right neo-fascists. Another Brit who has planned a show in Israel, i.e. unashamedly being complicit in the genocidal war. Another leaning far right Brit who quotes from the Quran without historical or present context.  Related As Brooke Ivey Johnson put it on the Metro , “ There is something uniquely deflating about watching a figure once synonymous with sharp, absurdist brilliance slip into reactionary cliché…   Watching him railing against imaginary enemies online, you can’t help but feel that what’s really being lost isn’t ‘Englishness’, but perspective. ”  British historian Simon Schama needs a history lesson

The media manufactures discursive cover, lawfare groups weaponise legal frameworks, institutions enforce discipline, police stage public spectacles of sovereign power, and so on. This division of labour allows repression to appear diffuse, uncoordinated, even spontaneous. Yet the cumulative effect is systematic and constitutes a multi-sited assault that targets solidarity from every direction while granting each actor plausible deniability. No single institution bears full responsibility; no single hand is seen to strike the blow. This insulates each node from legal liability, public outrage, and reputational damage, allowing institutions to maintain their liberal self-images while participating in illiberal outcomes. — European Legal Support Centre ,  The Multi-Sited Repression of  Palestine Solidarity in Britain,  2026, p. 30.

The Alibi of Capital

A review of Adam Hanieh’s A. Crude capitalism : Oil, corporate power, and the making of the world market

“The Minab case was no longer just a military case. It developed three layers. The first was technical and legal: was a school wrongly included in a military target package? The second was political: who, in those first days, denied responsibility or tried to shift it elsewhere?  And the third, perhaps more important than both, was moral: how did the deaths of children stop being a red line and become something people bargained over in the battle of narratives? This report begins with that first layer, but it does not stay there . Because the story of the Minab school is also the story of the moment when war contaminates language itself.”

A discussion between Vivek Chibber and Jason Brownlee Chibber a socialist/Marxist has excluded the political economy of capitalism in this long discussion about the US and Iran. Brownlee, speaking about the American army, used the phrase 'our troops' as a liberal identifying himself with the American state.  Both Chibber and Brownlee have used the words 'terrorist' and 'counterterrorism' when referring to non-state violence without putting them in inverted commas, i.e. in the same way the dominant mainstream narrative uses them. Oxford dictionary defines 'blunder' as 'a stupid or careless mistake'. Is that what should Marxists and socialists employ in describing imperialist actions such as wars, invasions, 'regime change', etc.?

11 perspectives offering a critical lens on the present moment

An update on his case against his dismissal from a UK-funded institute in Jerusalem.

“One thing that tends to happen when war breaks out is that everyone forgets everything that happened up until three minutes before the war.” But saying that “it's  all leading to the fact that this war was a massive mistake” is failing to see or acknowledge that the political economy of the United States at the current context and conjuncture. It fails to see that this war was likely had Biden or Harris was in the government. Biden too would have been influenced by Netanyahu. It also fails to see the connection an imperialist action on Venezuela and the war on Iran. It fails to see that internal contradictions in the US influence imperialist actions. Calling it a mistake remind us of how a few said the same thing about the invasion of Iraq.  “ The only winners at this point are the Israelis .” They are not the only winners. In the long term, American and Israeli interests converge. Other winners include a few Arab regimes, the oil companies…The lack of strategy reflects a lac...

On the Iran war

If the arrangement of society is bad (and ours is), and a small number of people have power over the majority and oppress it, every victory over Nature will inevitably serve only to increase that power and that oppression. This is what is actually happening.  — Leo Tolstoy, On Life and Essays on Religion , 1898

From the Financial Times 22 March 2026 The populist, anti-immigration party is surging in the polls thanks to the support of  young Spanish men, Vox leaders have found that old-school conservative preoccupations such as  bullfighting have lost much of their importance. Instead, Vox has learnt to exploit men’s deep-seated economic and social grievances, which have  become the defining feature of a new strain of Spanish populism. Young women still lean to the left, but there has been a striking shift among males: they identify as  being more rightwing than any other cohort of young men in the past 40 years. Many see themselves as victims of Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and his policies on the economy and immigration. While Sánchez celebrates Spain growing faster than any other major advanced economy in the past two years, young men complain that their personal hopes have been frustrated. Stoking their discontent are a band of populist rap artists and fa...

The Forsyte family is the lens through which we observe the state of the nation," playwright and screenwriter Lin Coghlan tells the BBC. "It was a moment in history where imperialism and profit built families and institutions – but at an extraordinary cost. A theme which never becomes irrelevant.” “Pivotal to the entire story is an episode in which he rapes his wife – although marital rape was not illegal when Galsworthy was writing: it was not outlawed in the UK until 1991. “Another of the books' themes is imperialism – dominion over other nations, as well as the dominion of one generation over another, and of one person over another. The family is the empire in miniature .”

Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power. — Theodore Roosevelt , 1904

From the Frankfurt School and radical social criticism to silence on war crimes. How Germany’s remembrance culture ignores [is complicit in] war crimes German publisher tells Palestinian staff to quit The hypocrisy of Jürgen Habermas At issue is not an accidental, negligible or ‘unfortunate’ streak of racism  in the works of a stellar European philosopher.

Western Hemisphere

“Do not dare challenge Israel’s bid for regional hegemony or ethnic cleansing of Palestine . Achieving the first would give Israel the immunity it needs for the second: rectifying the mistake the historian Benny Morris lamented when he criticized Ben Gurion for not expelling all the Palestinians in 1948.”

Challenges of overcoming both Arab chauvinism and Kurdish nationalism in building a political movement capable of winning self-determination for the Kurds and challenging the hold of both the imperialist powers and the local predatory and reactionary capitalists who rule in Syria. A long analysis with a historical background The disastrous Arab nationalism carries on

“Iran’s current economic and political crisis is often narrated as the cumulative outcome of international sanctions or authoritarian governance alone.  Such accounts, however, obscure the deeper political-economic transformations that have unfolded since the early 1990s.”

Renowned Palestinian historian and co-founder of the Institute of Palestine Studies