NM's blog

By Richard Seymour Patreon , 29 January 2026 You want to break the regime's ICE offensive? Get [Stephen] Miller. "This, briefly, is a lifelong political obsession for Miller. He is now back in the White House with general authority extending well beyond Homeland Security. He lobbied for Trump to invoke the Alien Enemies Act and for a massive funding surge for ICE. The use of the Alien Enemies Act, declaring migration an invasion, has long been a strategic goal of white supremacists. And for Miller it comes with the crucial benefit that, for the right, this gives the executive practically unlimited power to deal with the crisis. Miller has claimed that Trump has ‘plenary authority’, meaning his authority is practically limitless. The idea of using paramilitary force, organised as anti-immigration enforcement, to attack the left, comes from Miller. Even the propaganda themes, blitzing the press with endless garish examples of immigrant venality and criminality, and the fascinati...

Dutch police assaulted two muslim women, hitting one with baton and kicking the other in the stomach outside a shopping center in Utrecht on January 26. Via TRT World

“Deep political-economic transformations created the context for the events of this month …” What is  their meaning for the future of the Iranian regime? “Roiled from within and menaced from without, what are its chances of survival?”

It's only terrorism if they do it to us. When we do much worse to them, it's not terrorism. ― Noam Chomsky,  Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propagand a

A senior correspondent with a degree in Politics and History.  American power, unilateralism, interventions…,but nothing about the global capitalist economy in the last 40 years or so and the social reconfigurations in the US and the world. The most Little could say in passing: “ In any age of economic stagnation and extremes of inequality, popular trust in democratic institutions corrodes …” Words like economy and China do not feature even once. The innocent liberals are in denial. Robert Brenner and Dylan Riley: The current form of capitalist democracy, characterized by regular universal-suffrage elections and the alternation in power of competing parties of government, was largely an achievement of the post-war epoch. If the cataclysm of the First World War largely destroyed the  ancien régime  in Europe, it was the Second that opened the way to universal suffrage, under American military predominance, and at least began the process of unravelling Jim Crow in the...

Creative destruction? 'Capitalist development' on the blood and bones of Palestinians Palestinian-American writer Susan Abulhawa said that plan sought to “erase Gaza's indigenous character, turn what remains of her people into a cheap labour force to manage their ‘industrial zones’ and create an exclusive coastline for ‘tourism’.” “The indigenous traditions and social fabric of this land will be obliterated utterly,” she   said  on X. Saudi Arabia has been doing it at home.  'The freedom fighter' Zelensky has not accept Kushner's invitation to a coming not out of principle, but because Putin too is invited. The UK has expressed the same reaction.

A philosophical question?

“At a cost of over  11,000 dead fighters  and uncounted civilians, the predominantly Kurdish SDF defeated ISIS and prevented its re-emergence as a worldwide threat. Yet despite this incalculable service, the SDF and its homeland in northeast Syria came under assault by former ISIS fighters, effectively abandoned by its US ally . “A decade after  partnering with the US  and following the fall of Bashar al-Assad, the Kurdish sacrifices in hopes of regional self-determination feel painfully distant.”

Restoring US pre-eminence in the Western hemisphere “In 1973 the White House supported Pinochet’s coup. ‘I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people,’ Henry Kissinger had said a few years earlier . Now, decades later, the current US president has hailed the victory of Kast, whom he says he endorsed.” The intereference in Honduras last hear and now in Venezuela. The recent CIA operation in the latter has not “ provoked no response from Western governments, which are usually quick to pounce on instances of military aggression and electoral manipulation, as long as they can be attributed to Moscow.” “Ahead of Argentina’s parliamentary elections on 26 October, Trump conducted economic and financial blackmail similar to the attempt to ‘persuade’ Hondurans. “Washington has many tools for pressure and retaliation against Latin American countries, all of which help facilitate its redeployment across their region. Governments ca...

An old article, but a very interesting one . “It’s sort of a supreme irony here that we now have the technology such that not that many people have to work and we can produce a lot. We have the technology that would allow us to address the vexing environmental problems with probably far less of a cost than we’re going to have to end up paying. We have the technology so that we could have a much higher standard of living. The output per worker is radically higher than it was fifty years ago. Yet the standard of living for most people is lower. There are endless calls for cutbacks, and stagnation at the same time. This is an enormous paradox, and it’s only understood by understanding the contradictions built into the way capitalism works.” A fascinating and a deep analysis indeed. However, I suggest that we abandon the dichotomy ‘capitalism’ and ‘democracy’. They are not two, but one called capitalist democracy.   “This tension between capitalism and democracy,” as McChesney puts it...

You're not to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it. ―  Malcolm X,  By Any Means Necessary

Excerpts from a long, very engaging and thought provoking interview.  The colonisation of Palestine is an intrinsic “moment” in the history of European imperialism (beginning with the British Empire, followed by the French Empire, and continued to this day by Israel’s close association with the “Western” powers, which provide it with funding, weapons and diplomatic protection). It enacts its extreme forms (settler colonialism, which replaces the indigenous people with settlers, directing their expulsion and then elimination) and extends the imperialist enterprise even beyond its supposed historical endpoint. It uses the consequences of the extermination of the Jews of Europe as an opportunity, a (demographic and intellectual) resource, and an ideological cover. I would propose a critical variation on this scenario which, I hope, does not disregard its general truth. It is certainly true that Zionism, since its founding fathers (Herzl, Weizmann), has been both a typically “European”...

It sounds a good book

by Siyǎvash Shahabi Just look at the size of this crowd. These are people who came out fully aware of the risks—live bullets, arrest, even death. This presence is not random, not emotional, and not the result of some outside call. It is a conscious decision by people who feel they have nothing left to lose except humiliation and silence. Anyone who reduces the anger and uprising of Iranians to “foreign interference” or to “Pahlavi” is either not stupid but knowingly lying, or is a racist who does not want Iranians to deserve freedom, dignity, and the right to decide their own future. Or worse, they are someone cheering from afar, treating the clash between East and West like a Colosseum spectacle—applauding a gladiator fight while real people’s lives, futures, and deaths mean nothing to them. Our lives as Iranians cannot be reduced to this naive and stupid “East versus West” binary. We are not pieces on a geopolitical chessboard, and we are not tools for settling power struggles. The p...

An analysis by Eric Toussaint The international policy doctrine made public by the White House in early December 2025 is not simply a temporary shift in US foreign policy but the logical outcome of a process that has been underway for more than a quarter of a century in the context of the ’new Cold War.’. Under Donald Trump, this orientation takes on an unprecedented ideological form that is openly  predatory, violent, reactionary, authoritarian, and neo-fascist . Where previous administrations combined the exercise of imperialist violence with deeply hypocritical liberal and humanitarian rhetoric, the Trump administration has broken with this façade. Human rights, social rights, the protection of migrants, the self-determination of peoples and even the minimal reference to multilateralism have completely disappeared from official strategic discourse. They have been replaced by a worldview based on ’God-given natural rights,’ the absolute sovereignty of dominant states, the hierarc...

Trump’s bellicose language at face value – including  claims  that the US wants “to take back the oil … we should’ve taken back a long time ago” – can cause us to miss some of the deeper dynamics at play in the US invasion. Oil is unquestionably key to understanding what is going on, but in ways that go far beyond the direct control of Venezuela’s crude reserves. A must-read analysis by Adam Hanieh

Capital accumulation and political economic interests know no colour or religion.

A sharp critique of  Hamid Dabashi’s   After Savagery: Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilization The first essential question arises:  What, exactly, is the West?  Is it a set of institutions? A ruling class? States? Ideologies? Or is it a civilizational essence? The book offers no clear answer. Instead, it moves through sweeping formulations that turn the West into a spectral totality — a ghostly abstraction that, precisely when it should point its finger at concrete structures, replaces them with metaphors. The result is a perilous slippage: the real machinery that produces, distributes, and normalizes violence disappears, replaced by a single icon —  “white civilisation.”  But who constructs this civilization? Who fights within it? What contradictions tear through its interior? Here lies the book’s central flaw: its analysis does not  explain  power; it  assigns  essence. Instead of asking  which institutions, with...

“ Western media are flooded with different stories about Iran . It is hardly surprising that we are once again seeing a wave of racist and deeply stupid analyses that serve the far right and erase the agency of the Iranian people. This is not the first time, and it will not be the last. The West seems incapable of looking at countries like Iran without a racist lens.”

History should be taught as the history of the rise of civilization, and not as the history of this nation or that. It should be taught from the point of view of mankind as a whole, and not with undue emphasis upon one’s own country.  Children should learn that every country has committed crimes and that most crimes were blunders. They should learn how mass hysteria can drive a whole nation into folly and into persecution of the few who are not swept away by the prevailing madness. They should be shown movies of foreign countries in which the children, though aliens, would be enjoying much the same pleasures, and suffering much the same sorrows, as those enjoyed and suffered by children at home. —Bertrand Russell, What Is Democracy? A Background Book, published by the Batchworth Press (1953), Reprinted and revised in Fact and Fiction (1961), pp. 78-110