NM's blog

“More on the crisis of liberal expertise. This exchange over Yuri Slezkine's review on the "Western civilization" is a good illustration of how some scholars of Ukraine have managed to miss not only what has happened in the world since 2022 — saying without irony that the West offers an alternative to Russian barbarism in Ukraine, after Gaza and Iran, is simply nauseating — but also the developments within Ukraine itself (or perhaps still strategically obfuscating them). Slezkine's response at the end, on why Ukraine is an ethnonationalist state, is very strong.” —Volodymyr Eshchenko’s comment on Why ‘the West’?

 “The western world, structured by centuries of colonisation and the notion of ‘inferior races’, including Arabs and Muslims, was always favourable towards … falsehoods.  “Israel has always been the West’s main proxy to weaken and bully Arab states and populations. It is the West’s primary attack dog in the Middle East.  “Indeed, this horrible massacre of Palestinians is not being accomplished by Israel alone, but by an axis of genocide . Western media have done a good job of concealing the responsibility of western countries in what will probably be the first true enterprise of mass extermination of a people in the 21st century.” Yet Gabon implicitly appeals to the West to use an embargo and other tools to stop Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians instead of appealing to the Arabs who rose up in 2011 and 2019 to topple the rotten regimes that enable Israel and the West to carry on with their crimes.  According to this argument, when states commit mass violence...

Barbarism re-appears, but this time it is created inside civilisation itself and is an integral part of it. This is the leprous barbarism, barbarism as the leper of civilisation. —Karl Marx, 1847, Kleine ökonomische Schriften (Berlin: Dietz Verlag) 1955, p. 245.

“Western powers usually legitimize military interventions in terms of a proclaimed commitment to some universalist norm or to some goal embodying such a norm. These declared goals can oscillate, but they  are important because a central element of their foreign policy, particularly when it involves starting a war, is maintaining the support of their domestic population. In the Anglo-Saxon countries, people like to think of themselves as the guardians and promoters, through their states, of the most civilized, humane, liberal and democratic values in the world. It is true that they have short attention spans and are generally far more ignorant of the world outside their borders than the populations of many other countries,  but at least the elected leaders of their states can run into domestic trouble if the declared norms and goals are not implemented or if implementation is carried through with such barbarity that they contradict other, more basic, norms and goals .”  —P...

“So we can indeed call those folk barbarians by the rules of reason but not in comparison with ourselves, who surpass them in every kind of barbarism.” ( “Nous les pouvons donc bien appeler barbares eu égard aux règles de la raison, mais non pas eu égard à nous, qui les sur-passons en toute sorte de barbarité.”) —Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), Of Cannibals And that was before ‘the Enlightenment’, the guillotine, colonialism, the genocide of the red Indians, the Atlantic slave trade and the plantations, the American civil war, the Russian gulag, the British gulag in Kenya, the Holocaust, the two world wars, 

We attacked a foreign people and treated them like rebels. As you know, it's all right to treat barbarians barbarically. It's the desire to be barbaric that makes governments call their enemies barbarians. –Bertolt Brecht The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread.  When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out "stop!” When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.   – Bertolt Brecht,  Selected Poems General, Your Tank is a Powerful Vehicle It smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men. But it has one defect: It needs a driver. General, your bomber is powerful. It flies faster than a storm and carries more than an elephant. But it has one defect: It needs a mechan...

How far progress and regression are intertwined 

Islams and Modernities By Aziz Al-Azmeh

This is good. What it is about capitalism that makes Keynesianism a horizon even would-be revolutionaries — including Mann himself, he admits — have trouble seeing past. It is not so much an ideological block as a strategic one. ... to the extent that Keynesianism saved capitalism, it was from barbarism rather than socialism. And leftists are pulled to Keynesianism because, deep down, they believe that too. Most have lost confidence that there is a viable political path to socialism, while threats from various shades of the Right have followed one after another. For all the antidemocratic tendencies of Keynesianism, socialists today can hardly see themselves articulating the views of the masses either. The Keynesian counter-revolution

A book review My Lai: Vietnam 1968, and the Descent into Darkness

"Whoever until this day emerges victorious, marches in the triumphal procession in which today’s rulers tread over those who are sprawled underfoot. The spoils are, as was ever the case, carried along in the triumphal procession. They are known as the cultural heritage. In the historical materialist they have to reckon with a distanced observer. For what he surveys as the cultural heritage is part and parcel of a lineage [ Abkunft : descent] which he cannot contemplate without horror. It owes its existence not only to the toil of the great geniuses, who created it, but also to the nameless drudgery of its contemporaries. There has never been a document of culture, which is not simultaneously one of barbarism. And just as it is itself not free from barbarism, neither is it free from the process of transmission, in which it falls from one set of hands into another. The historical materialist thus moves as far away from this as measurably possible. He regards it as his task to brush...

Like in Rwanda and other wars, we, "the civilized", watched the spectacle and enjoyed "the peace" at home. The battle of Mosul: "Kill them all"

Still relevant "The uses of Al-Qaeda"

"The world’s refugee crisis, with its 65 million people on the move, more than at any time since 1945, knows no more sustained, sinister or surreal exercise in cruelty than the South Pacific quasi-prisons Australia has established for its trickle of the migrant flood ." (the NYT)

When we condemn and oppose the Western barbarism of the war and invasion of Iraq and the "liberal defense of murder" we are anti-American and supporters of Saddam Hussein. When we condemn and oppose Russian and Assad's barbarism we are dupes of US propaganda. When we condemn Israeli barbarism we are anti-semitic. When we condemn torrorist attacks in France and the US saying that is a product of state terrorism we are called apologists for terrorism. I guess we must be anti-semitic, anti-Russian, anti-American, CIA agent, Trotskyite socialist, Anarchists.

"I think that anti-war activists and socialists should condemn the actions of all states which commit acts of aggression and war crimes, not only those of Western powers or states aligned with the West"  " I think we should oppose Britain when it's doing things which are not good for the civilians of Syria, and its support for Israel and its backing of Saudi Arabia in its attack on Yemen, but we can also protest other countries when they're carrying out other barbarisms. It's just political consistency and speaking to principle." — Mark Boothroyd, a Labour Party activist

British imperialism's realism "Assad and rebels should join forces against IS: UK parliamentary committee"

Executions in Saudi Arabia and Iran.  Yes, both Iran and the Saudi Kingdom are barbaric and we know that. The difference, however, between their barbarism and the barbarism of the US, the British, the French, etc. is that Western modern babarism is carried out "democratically": there are meetings, debates and voting before deciding on the actions (invasions, occupations, air-strikes...), which, by the way, directly and indirectly, kill, maim, displace, etc far more people. One figure comes to mind: half a million Iraqi children killed by sanctions .  When they do it, it is barbarism and terrorism. When we do it, it is protecting "our way of life" because they are against freedom" and "democracy". Some people are exempt from being called barbaric and terrorists because they are our friends, they buy weapons from us, we helped them establish their Kingdom, they put money in our banks, they keep pumping enough oil which help us maintain "our ...