Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Transcript of Bashar al-Assad's victory speech, 2020

1. This is a 7-year war with half of the population either displaced or made refugees, and with about 400,000 killed (93% of them killed by the regime). 2. This is a brutal regime which crushed an uprising and a revolutionary prospect, supported by one regional power, which was the main winner from the destruction of Iraq, a furure winner in Syria and "a threat" to Israel, and an authoritarian state, which is a  big global power, but not a super-power, and it is in a geopolitical power struggle with the big imperialist states for spheres of influence. It used to be a friend of the main imperialist powers when a drunkard man opened the gates to "free market" and sold half of the country to foreign capitalists and newly-born local  ones, some of them now live in London. It is a regime that waged a  brutal war on the Chetchens and his "democratic" friends of the time looked the other way. 3. On the other side, known imperialist states, agents of glob...

"The only politics that offers a way out of the dilemma of contemporary Third World sovereignty is an internationalism that recognizes that its subjects are political actors, not just suffering subjects; that the repression launched by struggling secularist regimes undermines secularism just as it invites intervention; that the beneficiaries of Western intervention are to be found in Moscow, Riyadh, Arlington, and Islamabad, not Homs and Benghazi; and that the struggles of global refugee diasporas are coextensive with the domestic political communities they were forced to leave behind." How humanitarianism became imperialism

There are some similarities here with those Western leftists and liberals defending or appeasing Al-assad regime in Syria. Western leftists and China

"Robin Yassin-Kassab examines the axis of useful idiocy that responds to the rise of torch wielding fascism in the U.S. with whatabout-Hillaryisms, that defends British chauvinism as a tactic to combat globalism, and that defends the genocidal Syrian Regime as a hedge against 'Zio-Wahhabi' imperialism. "It isn’t surprising that the right sees every Syrian refugee as a potential terorist when the left has spent years  opining that the Syrian revolution is run by al-Qaida (or American imperialism, or Zionism). These beasts feed each other. The greatest threats today are rising authoritarianism, whether it calls itself leftist or rightist, and the preference for ideology over human reality, for simplistic conspiracism over complicated facts. This is going to get a lot more messy. We need answers to the politics of austerity and the undoubted tensions of a globalised and increasingly technologised economy. Nostalgia for the social compositions of earlier decades, and the...