Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

A must-read book Richard Seymour, 2024 The pseudo-insurrection in Washington, DC, on 6 January 2021, intended to stop a supposed theft of the presidential election and restore Trump to power, was fantasy putschism minted by online disinfotainment: Caesarism for the QAnon “generation. But it was not the last of its kind. In the space of less than a year, an alleged coup attempt by the neo-Nazi Reichsbürger movement in Germany was thwarted, supporters of Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro stormed government buildings in the hope of triggering ‘intervenção militar’ (military intervention), and the Russian paramilitary Wagner Group marched halfway to Moscow to force out the military leadership they blame for betraying the war on Ukraine. In every case, the pseudo-insurrection was justified by conspiracist paranoia. Mass violence in other forms, each motivated by its own fantasies of doom and redemption, has been enabled by national governments. In the Philippines, the line between police m...

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...

Armenian Genocide The War also brought full-scale genocide. The mass murders of Armenians by Turks in 1915 should not be thought of being marginal to Europe, committed amid a backward or ‘barbarous’ Islamic civilization. They were committed by a modernizing secular state, still a major player in European power-politics, committed to the most advanced European ideals. Thus I will address it at some length. [My italics N.M.] The death-toll was somewhere over one million, fifty to seventy per cent of all Armenians in the Turkish lands.14 If this was slightly lower than the Jewish loss-rate in the ‘Final Solution’, this was mainly because more Armenians could flee into neutral countries—350,000 of them managing to reach Europe, the biggest group of refugees during the war. The genocidal decision was taken by the Committee of Unity and Progress (CUP), the highest level of the Ittihadist (Young Turk) government. The orders were transmitted through reliable Ittihadist Governors and army grou...

In the ‘New World’ “deliberate genocidal bursts were more common among British than Spanish or Portuguese settlers. In both cases, we find that the stronger the democracy among the perpetrators, the greater the genocide.” The organic nationalists such the young Austrians argued for an organic conception of the people and state. Conflict – be it conflict of interet or class conflict – was to be transcended, for the people are indivisible and united.  Thus “late-nineteenth-century minorities in the East came under increasing pressure, leading through induced to coerced assimilation and thence to coerced emigration. Jews took the brunt of the pressure “During the nineteenth century, every Ottoman Turkish defeat in Europe resulted in mass flight and many killings of Muslims.” Settlers and Their Victims I note two persistent features of the colonial dark side. First, the settlers often enjoyed de facto local self-rule—whatever the constitution said. For the period, these were distinctly...

After reading Serfati’s analysis, I would consider his essay as an introduction to why the French state and its ruling class act the way they do at home and abroad . France has maintained a major role on the international scene, especially militarily, despite experiencing a relative decline in world economic power since the 1990s. In 2011, it ranked fifth in terms of military spending and sixth in terms of arms exports. It is a major zone of capital accumulation in the world economy and is centrally integrated into the global dynamics of economic, political, and military power. The overall closeness of elites in state institutions and large transnational corporations. French TNCs are increasingly dependent on profits earned in emerging or peripheral economies. when analysing the role of France in Africa, one must consider an interrelated set of economic, geopolitical, and domestic socio-political drivers. In 2009, France ranked third as a trading partner with Africa as a continent, beh...

Arguable, but very interesting. An interview with the author. Here are the main arguments in case you cannot access the article . “Constant emphasis on racial and ethnic disparities diverts public attention from the growing class divide in the West between the college-educated overclass and the working class. The nation-state is the only unit of government that has been able to mobilise extra-political popular sentiments and national identity to improve the condition of the majority of people, not just an oligarchy or aristocracy. The actual ruling class in the US and similar Western democracies is not a tiny number of freakishly rich individuals, or heirs and heiresses, but the top 10 or 15 per cent of the population – almost all of them with college diplomas and often graduate or professional degrees. I was criticised for arguing in  The New Class War  that education, not income, is the major dividing line between classes in the modern West.  There are two working class...

The age of the performer-entrepreneur Related Iron Musk is not a renegade outsider Employees fired after writing letter criticising Musk