Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Revealing the human side of the Syrian revolution/war

As the recently deceased country singer Toby Keith put it: Mess with this country and “We’ll put a boot (think: bomb) in your ass.” You kill three soldiers of ours and we’ll kill scores, if not hundreds, if not thousands of yours (and it doesn’t really matter if they’re soldiers or not), because… well, because we damn well can! America’s leaders, possessing a peerless Air Force, regularly exhibit a visceral willingness to use it to bomb and missile perceived enemies into submission or, if need be, nothingness. And don’t for a second think that they’re going to be stopped by international law, humanitarian concerns, well-meaning protesters, or indeed any force on this planet. America bombs because it can, because it believes in the efficacy of violence, and because it’s run by appeasers. It’s so hard to spread democracy to the barbarians, but we’ll keep trying

On reading Ghassan Kanafani’s “Letter from Gaza”

In ‘Egyptian Arabic’ with English subtitles. The original lyrics can be read here .

Source: the Financial Times 02 January 2024 Related Visualising Palestine: Gaza

عماد أبو اشتية – رسام وفنان تشكيلي أردني فلسطيني 

“Could we say … that the prioritization of form is detrimental—almost hostile—to the recollection of context? If we did, we would not be the first. Indeed, formal analysis has often been taken as an anti-political distraction or bourgeois salve for psyches incapable of grasping larger, more worldly contradictions: the small, beautiful thing has always been pitted by critical voices against the forgotten social reality. Still, it seems important to note that form is able to reduce and disarm our awareness of context only because awareness of context is so difficult to maintain; it depends on the comprehension of something intangible and hulking in the background, of that which necessarily exists outside the lines. And the rub: any overarching network of conditions—but especially those of global capitalism—is one we ourselves are implicated in and shaped by. We live and move in the same context that produces the forms we espy. No wonder we would rather see the form by itself. Isolated, i...

Beautifully written by Gabriel García Márquez in 1987. Let it be known that we knew love

 It is a nightmare that Americans easily sleep through Related Birth defects and the toxic legacy of the war on Iraq

Yes, I am a terrorist أنا إرهابي (na’am ana' irha'bii) The West cries in fear when I make a toy from a matchbox While they [the West] make a gallows of my body using my nerves for rope  The West panics when I announce one day that they have torn my galabia   While it is they who have urged me to be ashamed of my culture  And to announce my joy and my utmost delight when they violate me! The West is sorely grieved when I worship One God in the stillness of the prayer niche. While from the hair of their coattails and the dirt of their shoes  They knead a thousand idols that they set atop the dung heaps made of the titled ones  So that I become their slave and perform amongst them the rituals of flies.  And he, they will beat me if I announce my refusal.  If I mention among them the fragrance of flowers and grass  They crucify me, accusing me of terrorism!  Admirable are all the deeds of the West, and of its tails  As for m...

"How  could Germany of all countries have become a paragon, politically stable and economically successful, of democratic capitalism in the 1970s – ‘Modell Deutschland’ – and later, in the 2000s, Europe’s uncontested economic and political superpower? Any explanation must have recourse to a Braudelian  longue durée , in which destruction can be progress – utter devastation turned into a lasting blessing – because capitalist progress  is  destruction, of a more or less creative sort. In 1945 unconditional surrender forced Germany, or what was left of its western part, into what Perry Anderson has called a ‘second round of capitalist transformation’ of the sort no other European country has ever had to undergo. Germany’s bout was a violent – sharp and short – push forward into social and economic ‘modernity’, driving it for ever from the halfway house of Weimar, in a painful dismantling of structures of political domination and social solidarity, feudal fetters which ...

Walter Benjamin states that "the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realise that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against fascism." In other words, all class society is a permanent state of emergency in which the rulers are always under threat. Fascism is thus not some sort of breakdown of tradition but a continuation of traditional class rule by other means. Overcoming it thus requires not just anti-fascist attitudes but also a destruction of its roots in class oppression. Or, as Horkheimer put it in 1939: "If you don't want to talk about capitalism then you had better keep quiet about fascism."  

" Speaking of the happy new year, I wonder if any year ever had less chance of being happy. It’s as though the whole race were indulging in a kind of species introversion — as though we looked inward on our neuroses. And the thing we see isn’t very pretty… So we go into this happy new year, knowing that our species has learned nothing, can, as a race, learn nothing — that the experience of ten thousand years has made no impression on the instincts of the million years that preceded." — John Steibeck, 01 January 1941 Necessary contradictions of the human nature

Aleppo by Alaa as-Sayyed

The spectacle: Children in Aleppo do not get a million like because they don't hold teddy bears... In Spain, however, animal rights activists do Or ...

Capitalism " batters down all  Chinese walls ... In one word, it creates a world after its own image." " All that is  solid  melts into  air , all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life..." A prayer for Mecca — the city that many pilgrims don't see Also Mecca for the rich: Islam's holiest site 'turning into Vegas'

Domenico Losurdo: Ernst Nolte and the Development of Revisionism