NM's blog

“Trump spoke next. He arrived twenty minutes late and nobody clapped. He said it was the most silent room he had ever been in. He told them to applaud. No one applauded. Those senior officers sat and listened to the silence. No one applauded. “ No authoritarian right winger insults all their senior generals and admirals together . Pinochet did not do it. Putin doesn’t do it. Modi would not dream of it. Mussolini did not do it. Netanyahu hasn’t done it. Hitler never did it. It’s mad.”

Another of the BBC’s failures I would say. 20 years on and the Corporation feels it must repeat a lie. The intelligence argument is an argument that reinforces the belief among many that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake. The BBC is actually reinforces a lie. It is an argument to justify past and present British involvements in wars and conflicts: “our intention has always been the intention of a good player that supports ‘democracy’ and ‘freedoms’ all over the world.” Removing geopolitics, the political economy and American hegemony and ‘imperial’ functioning , help provide a narrow picture that reinforces the belief in the government and the ideology behind  interventions, ‘regime change’, aid, etc. The fact is that Britain is a junior player and has material and geopolitical interests with the US, the decisive power. A criminal needs an alibi . That is what happened prior the invasion of Iraq. Previous criminal actions also required alibis. Think of British support of Saddam i...

 “ I think we can get too distracted by minor doctrinal disputes between self-proclaimed centrists and right-wingers and miss the fact that the default intellectual culture in Anglo-America is overwhelmingly right wing. It tends to take reactionary and anti-left positions and has done so for a long time. The names can change. People can switch institutional affiliations. But the defense of the establishment and the US-led liberal order and other Cold War verities such as classical liberalism, Western values, the Enlightenment, and Zionism remains their primary task. This is the legacy of the lucrative conformism noted by Alfred Kazin and Czeslaw Milosz.” The Liberal Establishment is ‘a Stranger to Self-Examination’

Vassal States "So Macron is worried that Britain might become a vassal state of the US. Which planet has he been on these last four decades and more? A process that began in 1956 after the Suez debacle was lovingly completed by Thatcher and Blair. Britain has been a fully-fledged vassal for a long time. And France, especially under Jospin and Hollande, was/is moving in the same way. Militarily, ideologically, culturally the US dominates most of Europe. Britain's vassal status is enshrined on many levels and partially explains the hysteria that greeted Corbyn's election as Leader of the Labour Party and the non-stop attempts to denigrate and defeat him, of which the 'anti-semitism' campaign is the most recent. Even Corbyn will find it very difficult to break the shackles." —Tariq Ali, 22 August 2019

Ineffective "Mass marches in the UK"

Excellent! A must read. " ‘The deterioration of the intelligentsia,’ Arthur Koestler wrote, ‘is as much a symptom of disease as the corruption of the ruling class or the sleeping sickness of the proletariat. They are symptoms of the same fundamental process.’ One clear sign of intellectual infirmity is the desperation with which centrists and liberals, removed from the cockpit of American power, forage for ideas and inspiration on the lumpen right.  What differentiated the Western model from many Asian, African and Latin American networks of women’s groups and indigenous peoples, or alternative development and environmental organisations, was its indifference to ‘economic and social rights’: what Moyn defines as ‘entitlements to work, education, social assistance, health, housing, food and water’. Focusing on the violations of individuals’ rights by states, human rights groups valuably documented the crimes of the Contras in Nicaragua, the army and death squads in El Salvador,...

Genealogy of an era One should add a list of add-ons which helped gain the consent of the majority: Credit cards Low budget airlines Gadgets and consumerism Threat of an internal-external enemy vs. "our values" "There is no alternative" (after the collpase of the Soviet Union) A massive pile of TV series and movies Promoting individual advancement (underming solidarity and trade unions) Etc. The Third Way International

What, then, explains Brexit? Mass immigration is another fear across the EU, and it was whipped up in the UK by the Leave campaign, in which Nigel Farage was a conspicuous speaker and organiser, alongside prominent Conservatives. But xenophobia on its own is by no means enough to outweigh fear of economic meltdown. In England, as elsewhere, it has been growing as one government after another has lied about the scale of immigration. But if the referendum on the EU had just been a contest between these fears, as the political establishment sought to make it, Remain would have no doubt won by a handsome margin, as it did in the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence. There were further factors. After Maastricht, the British political class declined the straitjacket of the euro, only to pursue a native neoliberalism more drastic than any on the continent: first, the financialised hubris of New Labour, plunging Britain into a banking crisis before any other European country, then a Con...

Britain’s university system now “serves a renewed patrimonial capitalism and its ever-widening inequalities.”  —  John Holmwood’s 2014 valedictory message as British Sociological Association president.      The Rise of the Corporate University in the UK

Here is another one-dimensional way of thinking : A piece that never mentions the why (i.e. the geo-politics, the global and regional context, the so-called 'national-interest' cover or motive, etc) behind the belief, but focuses on the individual's neurons and the way that belief is held. Note also that Blair is a trained barrister by profession. His main skill is to know how to plead in court, using arguments and rhetoric not just knowledge of the legal system. Lawyers in general work within the system and they rarely challenge it. In fact they work to justify it most of the time.