NM's blog

A sharp critique of  Hamid Dabashi’s   After Savagery: Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilization The first essential question arises:  What, exactly, is the West?  Is it a set of institutions? A ruling class? States? Ideologies? Or is it a civilizational essence? The book offers no clear answer. Instead, it moves through sweeping formulations that turn the West into a spectral totality — a ghostly abstraction that, precisely when it should point its finger at concrete structures, replaces them with metaphors. The result is a perilous slippage: the real machinery that produces, distributes, and normalizes violence disappears, replaced by a single icon —  “white civilisation.”  But who constructs this civilization? Who fights within it? What contradictions tear through its interior? Here lies the book’s central flaw: its analysis does not  explain  power; it  assigns  essence. Instead of asking  which institutions, with...

History should be taught as the history of the rise of civilization, and not as the history of this nation or that. It should be taught from the point of view of mankind as a whole, and not with undue emphasis upon one’s own country.  Children should learn that every country has committed crimes and that most crimes were blunders. They should learn how mass hysteria can drive a whole nation into folly and into persecution of the few who are not swept away by the prevailing madness. They should be shown movies of foreign countries in which the children, though aliens, would be enjoying much the same pleasures, and suffering much the same sorrows, as those enjoyed and suffered by children at home. —Bertrand Russell, What Is Democracy? A Background Book, published by the Batchworth Press (1953), Reprinted and revised in Fact and Fiction (1961), pp. 78-110

For many, the memory of the Holocaust as a break with civilization is the moral foundation of the Federal Republic. To compare it with other genocides is therefore considered a heresy, an apostasy from the right faith. It is time to abandon this catechism .

How Israel Turned More Than 10,000 Children Into Collateral Damage Iris Leal Haaretz, 30 December 2024 “I love post-apocalyptic horror cinema, especially zombie movies. I struggle to define exactly the particular pleasure that I take in scenes of big, empty cities, neglect, a civilization being destroyed and hordes of bloodthirsty zombies roaming the ruins, but I love it. The template is always the same: a deadly fungus or virus created in a laboratory that spreads from chimpanzees to human beings turns everyone into crazed zombies with an uncontrollable desire to transmit the disease and annihilate humanity. As per the genre's rules, the heroes are always a small band of survivors, trying to reestablish society and civilization. In the best example of the genre, "28 Days Later," the pathogen is called the "Rage Virus." On October 7, 2023, murderous gangs of gunmen from  Hamas ' elite Nukhba Force infected Israeli society with a deadly virus. None of what we...

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.

Achieving objectives: Four Israeli lives worth hundreds of Palestinian ones.  Western complicity in crime continues

Ronaldo earns $136 million a year / about 11 million a month. 5,500 years ago: (3600 to 3500 BC): Uruk period in Sumer. First evidence of mummification in Egypt . If the first Mummy had been earning $32,000/month since his/her mummification – without spending a penny – he/she would have to live 4250 years to earn Ronaldo’s annual income. “There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” —Walter Benjamin

A must-read analysis

This an adapted rewriting of Heinrich von Treischke’s statement. “International law becomes meaningless when any attempt is made to apply its principles equally to barbarian nations. The only way to punish the Palestinians  is to make them pay tens of times for what they did; it is the only sort of example they understand. For the Israeli state and its backers to apply international law in cases like this would not be either humanity or justice; it would be shameful weakness.” The original quote: In 1898, the German political scientist Heinrich von Treischke stated what many of his contemporaries would have regarded as the obvious: “International law becomes meaningless when any attempt is made to apply its principles equally to barbarian nations. The only way to punish a black tribe is to burn their villages; it is the only sort of example they understand. For the German empire to apply international law in cases like this would not be either humanity or justice; it would be shame...

Frédéric Lordon : «   Terrorisme   » est un mot impasse. Concéder «   terrorisme   », c’est annuler que ce qui se passe en Israël-Palestine est politique. Au plus haut point. Même si cette politique prend la forme de la guerre, se poursuivant ainsi par d’autres moyens selon le mot de Clausewitz. Le peuple palestinien est en guerre – on ne lui a pas trop laissé le choix. L’acharnement à faire dire «   terrorisme   » ne satisfait que des besoins passionnels – et aucune exigence intellectuelle. «   Terrorisme   » a une irremplaçable vertu : donner une violence pour dépourvue de sens. Et de causes Les tragédies israéliennes sont incarnées en témoignages poignants, les tragédies palestiniennes sont agglomérées en statistiques. Le bloc bourgeois quand il fait bloc derrière Israël à l’extérieur saisit surtout l’occasion de faire bloc contre ses ennemis à l’intérieur. Le bloc bourgeois français est plus israélien que les Israéliens : il refuse q...

Among the 150-plus photographs, images of Latin America, Africa, and the Indian subcontinent appear hardly at all and usually as a foil or kitschy reflection of Euro-American modernity. North Korea, the kitschiest foil of them all, appears as many times as the entire African continent. For all our differences, [the exhibition ] Civilisation seems to preach, we people of the world are essentially the same, and we’re all trying to make the best of life within the inescapable confines of US-exported late capitalism.

En français, فارسي, italiano Related Pasolini and Israele – paradoxical modernities

‘British troops to help at Poland-Belarus border’ ‘Polish forces tear-gas migrants at Belarus border’ ‘Poland to build border wall to stop migrant influx’ ‘Freezing to death on the edge of the EU’ The sad fact is that we have become immune to the suffering of other people unless they are pets or useful material. After all, they are not white Belarusians fleeing ‘the last dictatorship in Europe’.

“A society is not the temple of value-idols that figure on the front of its monuments or in its constitutional scrolls; the value of a society is the value it places upon man’s relation to man. To understand and judge a society one has to penetrate its basic structure to the human bond upon which it is built; this undoubtedly depends upon legal relations, but also upon forms of labour, ways of loving, living, and dying.” —The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty “What fiction reveals about the Algerian War”

Coronavirus and Civilisation Related UK Home Secretary refuses to take children from Greek camps

Nature's wake-up call to complacent civilisation

"This topic [the importance of individuality] brings me to that worst out-crop of the herd nature, the military system, which I abhor. That a man can take pleasure in marching to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him. He has only been given his big brain by mistake; a backbone was all he needed. This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism by order, senseless violence, and all the pestilent nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how I hate them! War seems to me a mean, contemptible thing: I would rather be hacked in pieces than take part in such an abominable business. And yet so high, in spite of everything, is my opinion of the human race that I believe this bogey would have disappeared long ago, had the sound sense of the nations not been systematically corrupted by commercial and political interests acting through the schools and the press." — Albert Einstein , (1879 - 1955) Physicist & Nobel L...

“At this time, we are seeing a regression in the humanitarian dimension of those civilisations, as countries protect themselves by closing their doors. I hope that this novel, somehow or other, will have given voice to brittle lives, which are judged by others without understanding them or investigating what brought them to their current state." Lebanese author Hoda Barakat wins international prize for The Night Fall But the awarding body is funded by the UAE!!!

I am with terrorism Niza'r Qabbani, London 1997. See the original Arabic version here . Qabbani was a Syrian poet, diplomat and publisher. We are accused of terrorism:  if we defended rose and woman  and the mighty verse ...  and the blueness of sky ...  A dominion .. nothing left therein...  No water, no air ..  No tent, no camel,  and not even dark Arabica coffee!!  We are accused of terrorism:  if we defended with guts  the hair of Balqis  and the lips of Maysun  if we defended Hind, and Da`d  Lubna and Rabab ..  and the stream of Kohl  coming down from their lashes like the verses of revelation.  You will not find with me  a secret poem  or a secret logos  or books I put behind doors.  I do not even have one poem  walking down the street, wearing veil.  We are accused of terrorism:  if we wrote about the ruins of a homeland  torn, weak ...  a homeland with...

Islams and Modernities By Aziz Al-Azmeh