Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

"Late in life, William F. Buckley made a confession to Corey Robin. Capitalism is "boring," said the founding father of the American right. "Devoting your life to it," as conservatives do, "is horrifying if only because it's so repetitious. It's like sex." With this unlikely conversation began Robin's decade-long foray into the conservative mind. What is conservatism, and what's truly at stake for its proponents? If capitalism bores them, what excites them? Tracing conservatism back to its roots in the reaction against the French Revolution, Robin argues that the right is fundamentally inspired by a hostility to emancipating the lower orders. Some conservatives endorse the free market, others oppose it. Some criticize the state, others celebrate it. Underlying these differences is the impulse to defend power and privilege against movements demanding freedom and equality. Despite their opposition to these movements, conservatives favor...

Venezuela "While the official line was that the uprising was the work of the Venezuelan masses, everything the Trump administration did reinforced the message that it had been made in Washington." Note that the liberals who wrote the article did not put the words "uprising" and "liberation" in inverted commas., and they don't seem to condemn the attempted coup. After all, Western regimes and some others have supported the interim president. That would enough to make a successful coup a "liberation".  1. An "uprising/revolution", if it exists, should be judged by its class or social groupings character. It should be decided by the balance of forces inside a country. 2. An imperialist state is reactionary by its nature. And the American one nowadays is even more reactionary that 5 years ago. A reactionary force cannot by its nature support a radical progressive change. It would an anomaly if it does. 3. The support of Russia ...

Foreign Powers and the Syrian Calculus

The U.S military budget in 2017 was more than $600 billion. That's more than the budgets of the next 13 countries put together. Trump has requested an increase of $54 billion for this  year budget.  That is almost the entire military budget of Russia. "No one is gonna mess with us, folks, no one."  —Donald Trump

"I learned that the Obama administration’s support for the Arab Spring uprisings had been hobbled from the start by internal disagreements over the same issues that now define Trump policy — about the nature of the threat from political Islam, about fidelity to autocratic allies like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, and about the difficulty of achieving democratic change in Egypt and the region." The White House and the Strongman See also, It is a pattern

Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has said in the aftermath of the 'Western' attack on Syria that "The US president, UK prime minister and the president of France are criminals." So are him, Bashar al-Assad and Putin. 

"Facebook let a firm called GSR  scrape 50 million user profiles  and sell the data to another firm, Cambridge Analytica, whose express purpose was to  manipulate electoral behaviour  in favour of Donald Trump. That’s the one-paragraph summary of a story that will unfold with increasing complexity this week. Cambridge Analytica will be in the frame, basically, for lying to British MPs – and is now being investigated by the authorities in Massachusetts where it are based. But the scandal is just the latest in a series for Facebook, creating an existential moment for the world’s biggest social media corporation." Source: novaramedia.com A good analysis here (you only need to enter an email address to read it): You are the product: it zucks!

A rare use of the word bougreoisie by the Financial Times, without inverted commas. Before 2008 the word 'capitalism' itself was almost absent except among some far left-wingers. The Western ruling class, the corportae media and other defenders of the system see Trump as a liability, but also some other 'excesses' of the system (such as inequality) might threaten the 'credibility' of capitalism. The discreet terror of the American bourgeoisie

"The Cold War served as a good justification for almost any outrageous action. One could use the Cold War to justify throwing one’s grandmother under the bus." "The obvious difference between present-day populism in the United States and in Iran is that while the former is a threat to the whole planet, the latter is a detriment mostly to its own people." " Economists began predicting the imminent demise of the regime almost as soon as it was installed in February 1979. The main reason their predictions did not come true is precisely because the regime established a fairly comprehensive welfare state. The gradual but consistent shift to the right in recent years naturally erodes this welfare state and thereby undermines the social basis of the regime." I don't agree with the use of the word "populism". Nowadays, liberals and neoliberals use it to describe progressive and leftist movements and leaders in order to vilify and discredit them...

Trump and Boko Haram

One more confirmation that the US imperialist, criminal regime has never planned a 'regime change' in Syria. First it called for "a Syrian regime without al-Assad, then gave limited support to the rebels, which could not even defend itself against the killing machine of the Syrian regime and its Russian backers. 

Assad attends Eid prayers in Hama

Saudi palace coup: the sequel

Trump is just being true to the unclear American imperialist strategy to the Syrian regime: “I really believe that we should have and still should take out his airfields and prevent him from being able to use them to bomb innocent people and drop sarin gas on them.”  — Hilary Clinton See also  American foreign policy under Obama

What we found is a phenomenon that explains, with remarkable clarity, the rise of Donald Trump — but that is also much larger than him, shedding new light on some of the biggest political stories of the past decade. Trump, it turns out, is just the symptom. The rise of American authoritarianism is transforming the Republican Party and the dynamics of national politics, with profound consequences likely to extend well beyond this election. The rise of American authoritarianism