Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please. —Hannah Arendt, an interview with Roger Errera, 1974

A coup at 50

I would use the word "Russian imperialism" cautiously, though. The rest stands accurate in my view. Richard Seymour in 2015: An unabashed mobilisation of ancient colonial binaries, with Russian imperialism cast as the guardian of secular, modern, liberal civilization against a barbarian ISIS. Its author has stated the upshot of this perspective quite explicitly : "kill them all". Or, to put it another way, exterminate the brutes. One is reminded of peak Hitchens, and of the traditions of imperialist apologia that he more or less deliberately evoked. And one is impressed by how deep this goes in parts of the left. Of course, Russian imperialism is not defending secular liberalism; that's not how imperialism works. And its targets are demonstrably much broader than ISIS. Of course, the Assad dictatorship is much more steeped in blood than ISIS at this point. The colonial unconscious, even if it has no history, should be placed in historical context. In the afterma...

  Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier of the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers' enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this apparatus and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others. ―  Simone Weil

  Obituary

“Last month, the United Nations voted  overwhelmingly  to call on the United States to lift the embargo. Only the United States and Israel voted no. (Ukraine, Colombia, and Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil were the only abstentions.) And 184 nations voted yes.” I think if the Cuban regime wants to survive both foreign intervention and not being overthrown, it must cease repression and open complete dialogue with all different bodies in the Cuban society. However, given the nature of the regime, I doubt that such a move would happen. The recent examples in Belarus, Egypt and others show that the opposite is usually the case. The US must end its brutal sanctions on Cuba

Dictatorship dies in darkness

"It's a weird time. This week I'm noticing two rather disturbing bandwagons rolling, both arising from Manchester. One is about UK domestic politics and the other international politics but they are linked by an understandable desire not to see the attack as being used to advance the agenda of the Tories and specifically, to help their election campaign. Both though are ultimately very unhelpful. One is about the need for soldiers on the streets because Theresa May  cut police budgets as Home Secretary. I've seen unlikely people sharing tweets from redundant cops. Tempting to undercut May this way, but wrong - more armed cops do not equal fewer attacks like Manchester. The other is pinning the blame for Manchester on the UK intervention in Libya.  Again, understandable.  But it's important to see that the problem in Libya was not the attempted regime change as such but the regime that people tried to change i.e. Gaddafi's tyranny. It was a regime that - like...

Another crime by that man on the five-pound note How Churchill broke the Greek resistance

The left's hollow anti-imperialism over Syria

To foreign ministries in the global north, Sisi is a familiar face in an ever-more unfamiliar region – and one that they’re ready to do business with. In the past two years Egypt has signed major new arms deals with both the US and France. Donald Trump has labelled his Egyptian counterpart ‘a fantastic guy’. In late 2015, David Cameron rolled out the red carpet for Sisi at Downing Street; Theresa May has promised ‘a new chapter in bilateral relations’ between the UK and Egypt and as I speak Boris Johnson is in Cairo, drumming up trade deals. Italy did, thanks to popular pressure on the ground, temporarily withdraw its ambassador to Egypt in protest at Giulio’s murder. But between 2011 and 2013 alone, Italy sold Egypt more than half a billion euros worth of guns and bullets. The police trucks that many of the journalists and political prisoners I mentioned earlier found themselves locked up in after being dragged from their homes in the night are ...

Spurious analysis, marked by defeatism, blame games, and political jockeying masquerading as moral criticism and righteousness became the order of the day in the last months of 2016. The conceptualizations and convictions that were discussed in previous years became axioms to many: “lesser evil” dictatorships vs. Islamist unknowns, “rebellious” imperialism vs. “reactionary” resistance, Sunnis vs. Shi`is, and everyone vs. “terrorism” won the highest marks. The lack of a long view and analysis of slow-moving factors over extended periods of time gave way to instant scholarship that was produced and reproduced based on events and even particular battleground outcomes. A Preface to Critique of Instance Analysis and Scholarship on the Arab Uprisings

Sowing the seeds of dissent "The economic roots of the Syrian revolution"

"As Hitchens said, those who secretly cheer Assad’s takeover of Aleppo don’t know what they are talking about. Or they forgot what it is like to live under a regime that kills and tortures in times of peace as it does when it is embattled. People in Syria rose up because they wanted their country to be free. What happened later, including the rise of extremism and lawlessness, was a product of the way the regime responded to the demands of young men and women." Note : Christopher Hitchens supported the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq thus he was the camp of "the liberal defence of murder".  Using Hitchens' argument for the Syrian situation excludes the fact that an uprising/a revolution aimed at overthrowing the regime. It also implies that there is no way for the Syrians, or any other people who rise up against dictatorship, to achieve anything without the help of the Western imperialism. The "Western states" should always do something. No t...

Bahrain and the International Institute of Strategical Studies

A Dr.  preaching neo-orientalism, imperialism and patronizing other countries , brandishing an empty term ("democracy) of the West, i.e. the capitalist, imperialist democracy of the Western powers that we have seen in practice not only in wars and occupations, but in IMF adjustment programmes, in global capitalism's uneven development, in plunder by corporations, in NGOs working with repressive regimes and perpetuating power structure, in Western powers working with local regimes in aborting, diverting or co-opting uprisings or confining it to the parliamentary capitalist democracy, oppression within the undemocratic European Union itself, level of corruption on an unprecedented scale, driving down wages, undermining unions (even banning people from joining a union), gambling with pensions, corporatization of education, undermining academic freedom, a development of an oligarchy and a mediaocracy, depolitization, passivity and narcissism, a plague called identity politics ins...

The Battle of Chile

How accurate is this? " Backward economies can be 'modernized' more or less on their own, but this seems to require dictatorial regimes which will sweat out of a generation or two the primary accumulation of capital goods needed. Backward economies can also be modernized, perhaps more slowly, without dictatorial regimes, but this seems to require that they be greatly and intelligently helped by industrially advanced nations. There do not seem to be other alternatives" ( The Causes of World War III , 1958, p. 75).

I have read the Preface of this long piece and I have found it revolting, disgusting and sickening to say the least.

Viva La Revolución by Eric Hobsbawm review – Latin America from leftwing hopes to bloody dictatorships