Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

An interview with Mike Davis in 2018

It was the very same Zelensky who   withdrew  U kraine's membership from the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People in 2020. As Israel was killing and bombing Palestinians in May 2021, Zelensky   depicted  it as the victim of the Palestinians and not as a predatory settler-colonial state which Ukrainian Jews helped establish. Ironically, that Zelensky thinks Israel’s neighbours "want to see us dead" may be no more than a psychological projection of what he and the Israelis want to see happen to Palestinians, not the other way around.  The Ukrainian Jewish role in the dispossession of Palestine

 The life and death of Leon Trotsky

The End of Anti-Fascism Related: The New Anti-Communism: Rereading the Twentieth-Century

Good! Marx deserves better critics

The prophet perverted

Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman

"We formed an alliance with Stalin right at the end of the most murderous years of Stalinism, and then allied with a West German state a few years after the Holocaust. It was perhaps not surprising that in this intellectual environment a certain compromise position about the evils of Hitler and Stalin—that both, in effect, were worse—emerged and became the conventional wisdom." — Thimothy Snyder, a Professor of History at Yale, US. An interesting perspective. Stalin vs. Hitler: who was worse? Who killed more: Hitler, Stalin, or Mao?

100 years after the Russian Revolution History from Below

A review of Anne Applebaum's Red Famine

"At the start of the 18th century, India’s share of the global economy was 23 percent – the size of all of Europe combined. By the end of nearly 200 years of British rule, first under the proto-multinational corporation East India Company and then, after 1858, direct governance by the British crown, India’s share had dropped to just over 3 per cent, following the deliberate destruction of thriving local industries by the British. Perhaps most shocking is the section detailing the 30-35 million Indians who needlessly died in the series of famines under the British Raj, the most recent of which was the 1943-4 Bengal Famine. Tharoor calls these ‘British colonial holocausts’, comparing them to the 25 million people who perished in Stalin’s collectivisation drive and political purges." Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India

Inside the Gulag

"One can disagree with, say, historian Orlando Figes’s conclusions without querying the seriousness of his research, but his assertion in  A People’s Tragedy  that “hatred and indifference to human suffering were to varying degrees ingrained in the minds of all the Bolshevik leaders” is simply absurd (and his disapproving fascination with their leather jackets curious). In Russia, Virginia Woolf wrote in  Orlando , “sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them”. Of course this is a literary flourish, a common and unsustainable romanticised Russian essentialism. But even so, the formulation feels prophetic for this particular Russian story. Chernyshevsky’s dots describe the revolution itself. Pravda’s blank hole contains tactics. Unsayables are by no means all there is to this strange story, but they are central to it." Why does the Russian Revolution matter? See also this in the New York Times

Sullenly clenching His embalmed fists, He peered through a crack, Just pretending to be dead. He wanted to remember all those Who carried him out. I turn to our government with a plea: To double, And triple the guard at the grave site So Stalin does not rise again, And with Stalin, the past. And later, the main point of the poem: We removed Him From the mausoleum. But how do we remove Stalin From Stalin’s heirs? — Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Western imperialism, financed, supported and used some of them. Stalinism repressed them. They were, and still have been, part of the geo-political chess board. "How the USSR’s effort to destroy Islam created a generation of radicals" Sleeping With the Devil: How U.S. and Saudi Backing of Al Qaeda Led to 9/11 A Special Relationship "CIA roots of Islamic fundamentalism" I don't agree with the title though and everything in the analysis, but there is a good background.

... of the absurdities in history, of the contradictions in humans ... Jerusalem 2016