NM's blog

Bertrand Russell warns that racial pride can quickly become harmful racial supremacy (1946): “Another passion which gives rise to false beliefs that are politically harmful is pride - pride of nationality, race, sex, class, or creed. When I was young France was still regarded as the traditional enemy of England, and I gathered as an unquestionable truth that one Englishman could defeat three Frenchmen. When Germany became the enemy this belief was modified and English people ceased to mention derisively the French propensity for eating frogs. But in spite of governmental efforts, I think few Englishmen succeeded in genuinely regarding the French as their equals.  Americans and Englishmen, when they become acquainted with the Balkans, feel an astonished contempt when they study the mutual enmities of Bulgarians and Serbs, or Hungarians and Rumanians. It is evident to them that these enmities are absurd and that the belief of each little nation in its own superiority has no objective...

Europe’s reputation as a cosmopolitan haven has been exposed as a mirage Related A bigger picture was captured by Peter Gowan more than 20 years ago: “The cosmopolitan project for unifying humanity through the agency of the dominant capitalist states—on the normative basis that we are all individual global citizens with liberal rights—will not work: it is more likely to plunge the planet into increasingly divisive turmoil.” The New Liberal Cosmopolitanism

  Via Edward Maltby How to explain Marxism to a Financial Times reader Similarly, take the idea/l of democracy, you wouldn't blame it for the 20th century horrors that wrecked Europe. Those were the consequences of the contradictions of capitalism and imperialism. Or, in a more subtle way, they were the "dark side" of capitalist democracy, not of the ideal of democracy per se. In wikepedia entries on the nature of former Eastern European regimes, pervasive and unhelpful conflation of "socialism", "communism" and "Stalinism" is abound. Poland, for example, according to wikipedia, was socialist before 1990. 

From the archive "Islamist violence" An interview with Karen Armstrong Religion Fights Back Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (Armstrong's book e-book)

Sexuality and Solitude Foucault and Sennet, 1981

"This inclusion of Islam in the Nietzschean catalogue of more 'honest', pre-, non- or even anti-European societies offers two further points of interest: first, that Nietzsche's remarks do not greatly differ from the kinds of observations a whole century of European Orientalists were making about Arabs and Muslims in general — that Islam is incapable of democracy, that is fanatical and warlike, that it is Frauenfeindlich and socially unjust, etc. Nietzsche's only difference, ironically, is that he affirms these prejudices instead of lamenting them. Nietzsche, who had never visited a Muslim country and whose closest brush with the 'Orient' was the 'southern' sensuousness of Naples, had to rely on an extremely unreliable canon of Orientalists for his information about Islam and Arab culture. The fact that Nietzsche's opposition to 'progress' led him to react positively to the kind of racial and generic defamations attributed to the Middl...

"People are violent, and people can dress their violence up in any number of justifying causes that seek to relieve people of their personal responsibility because the cause or religion, be it Communism or Catholicism or Islam , is simply bigger than themselves." ( Foreignpolicy.com ) I read that and smiled. The liberals too hide their heads in the sand and turn a blind eye on the violence of capitalism and imperialism since the inception of the system: the slave trade, slave labour, conquests and colonization, two world wars, and to this day the violence of the global system is both direct and symbolic and we can see its effects also on nature and on our Earth. Actually, a serious observer traces the emergence of Daesh not only to the Iraq occupation, but also to the neoliberal policies of the Assad regime, climate change and the drought in Syria.