Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Leftist Organicism There was a leftist version, though the inter-war emergence of  organicism was slower and less thorough on the Left. The new USSR  quickly embraced the statism that pre-war socialist and especially  communist movements had denounced. 20 By September 1918, the  independence of the soviets, the unions and the law was almost gone, the Cheka secret police was into its first murders, ‘merciless extermination’ was declared to be the fate of the kulak class enemy, concentration camps were built and the ‘Red Terror’ had been formally inaugurated. Statism was seen more as political necessity than moral principle—unlike extreme rightism. Nonetheless, some Bolshevik language had begun to resemble fascist language. Trotsky made a famous speech with a decidedly fascist title: ‘Work, Discipline and Order Will Save the Soviet Socialist Republic’. He also sometimes praised paramilitary virtues: economic problems, he declared, had to be ‘stormed’ with ‘disciplined...

Toppling George Washington and the myth of American democracy Related Winston Churchill and the use of chemical weapons Controversies of Churchill's career 

 "The British bourgeoisie do not spare any money as far as this institution is concerned, and that is as it should be." — Lenin,  impressed by the British state's commitment to the British Museum library. London's role in the Russian revolution

"We cannot ignore that war if we want to understand the end of this revolutionary democracy, and those who draw a straight line from October 1917 to Stalinism invariably ignore or downplay the impact of that bloody conflict." The Revolutionary Democracy of 1917

Left-wing Perspectives on Political Islam (Free subscription may be required to access the article)

"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

Domenico Losurdo: Ernst Nolte and the Development of Revisionism

An exhibition Out with bourgeois crocodiles! How the Soviets rewrote children's books