NM's blog

“Let’s take a good look at ourselves, if we have the courage, and let’s see what has become of us. “First of all we must confront an unexpected sight: the striptease of our humanism. Not a pretty sight in its nakedness: nothing but a dishonest ideology, an exquisite justification for plundering; its tokens of sympathy and affectation, alibis for our acts of aggression. The pacifists are a fine sight: neither victims nor torturers! Come now! If you are not a victim when the government you voted for and the army your young brothers served in, commits “genocide,” without hesitation or remorse then, you are undoubtedly a torturer. And if you choose to be a victim, risking one or two days in prison, you are simply trying to take the easy way out. But you can’t; there is no way out. Get this into your head: if violence were only a thing of the future, if exploitation and oppression never existed on earth, perhaps displays of nonviolence might relieve the conflict. But if the entire regime, e...

A manufactured crisis that far-right politicians have tapped into for their own political gain. Related Spain's revolt against the rentiers The bitter irony was that hundreds of thousands lost their homes because there were hundreds of thousands of homes too many.

A liberal take As Greg Bovino strode towards the stage, the crowd erupted into chants: “USA! USA! USA!” It was late May, several months since Bovino’s ignoble ousting as the greatcoat-clad “commander at large” of US border control. But for this audience, Bovino’s record was not a liability. It was his calling card. In Figueira da Foz, a sleepy Portuguese beach town just south of Porto, a few hundred of Europe’s most important far-right influencers, decision makers and activists had gathered for the “Remigration Summit”.  A gathering to strategise how to expel millions of migrants deemed ethnically “unsuitable” from Europe, by force or encouragement, including those legally settled. The Americans — not just Bovino but several dozen, including Stefano Forte, president of the New York Young Republican Club — were the guests of honour. Remigration, Bovino told his audience, is the defining political issue of our time. “I’ll make you a deal, Europe,” he said. “We get this remigration un...

If nationalisms in the rest of the world have to choose their imagined community from certain 'modular' forms already made available to them by Europe and the Americas, what do they have left to imagine? History, it seems, has decreed that we in the postcolonial world shall only be perpetual consumers of modernity. Europe and the Americas, the only true subjects of history, have already thought out on our behalf not only the script of colonial enlightenment and exploitation, but also that of our anticolonial resistance and postcolonial misery. Even our imaginations must remain forever colonised. —Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, 1993, p. 5

“In an anthropological spirit…I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. “The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind. The most messianic nationalists do not dream of a day when all the members of the human race will join their nation in the way that it was possible, in certain epochs, for, say, Christians to dream of a wholly Christian planet. “It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely...