NM's blog

The ghost of the former colonial subject haunts (without their being aware of it) relations among whites who have never left Europe. —Octave Mannoni, The Decolonization of Myself

“Among all world regions, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) holds the worst record for workers’ rights. The index data by the  International Trade Union Confederation “ shows that  every country  in the MENA region has blocked the formation or membership of  independent trade unions . In other words, the legal and administrative systems in these countries are deliberately structured to prevent any form of autonomous labor organization.  95%  of countries in the region violate the right to strike, and  89%  restrict freedom of assembly and speech. Even when rights exist on paper, the actual space to exercise them is closed off. In  84%  of MENA countries, workers have  no effective access to justice —meaning that when their rights are violated, there is no real legal or institutional recourse. “In 2014, Europe had an average score of  1.84 , suggesting relatively strong protections. But by 2024, the average has fallen to...

“We must understand this ‘age of rearmament’ within a geopolitical and geo-economic struggle in global disorder. Decades of economic stagnation make global competition increasingly violent, and zero-sum struggles are on the rise. Each regional bloc tries to maintain its position in the world market at the expense of other countries. This translates into new trade wars and new territorial divisions. And then there is a long list of free trade agreements to secure the supply of raw materials, massive investments in fossil energy infrastructure and migration agreements that reinforce necropolitics. The cannons should not stop us seeing the wood for the trees .” Related Nato's imperialism strategic concept Hypocrisy and savagery End of innocence

A genocidal state says the truth: The "world map won’t change if all the people of Gaza were to vanish.” "No one will notice you, no one will ask about you. You are left alone to face your inevitable fate," the leaflets read . "Neither the US nor Europe care about Gaza. Even your  Arab states  don’t care, they are now our allies, they provide us with money, weapons and oil. They only send you shrouds."

Armenian Genocide The War also brought full-scale genocide. The mass murders of Armenians by Turks in 1915 should not be thought of being marginal to Europe, committed amid a backward or ‘barbarous’ Islamic civilization. They were committed by a modernizing secular state, still a major player in European power-politics, committed to the most advanced European ideals. Thus I will address it at some length. [My italics N.M.] The death-toll was somewhere over one million, fifty to seventy per cent of all Armenians in the Turkish lands.14 If this was slightly lower than the Jewish loss-rate in the ‘Final Solution’, this was mainly because more Armenians could flee into neutral countries—350,000 of them managing to reach Europe, the biggest group of refugees during the war. The genocidal decision was taken by the Committee of Unity and Progress (CUP), the highest level of the Ittihadist (Young Turk) government. The orders were transmitted through reliable Ittihadist Governors and army grou...

Peter is emphatic that a focus on class politics means organising the working class in all its diversity. He contrasts the position taken by the PTB with that of Sahra Wagenknecht, who split off from Die Linke in Germany to form the anti-migration BSW Party. ‘I’m not happy with their tendency, this kind of socialism and chauvinism combined, because they are locking themselves up inside of Germany…  And I think that the basic thing of the Left is to empower people, to make them proud, to make them feel part of something again, part of a bigger history, a bigger collectivity, a class, a movement that they can be proud of.’ It sounds a new and promising leftist experience. Note though that there is not a single internationalist mention/discussion. Is class only national? 

A realistic stance ‘An effective way to protect prosperity’  where the birthrate is among the lowest in Europe.

“ Europe’s military arsenal is not well prepared for war  … because for the last thirty years we thought that war was not coming back to Europe.”  But has war ever left Europe?

The Tightly Packed Contradictions of Global Capitalism

“Bonapartism has reemerged stronger than before. In Macron it assumes a classic form. The right of the Rassemblement National and the left of La France insoumise (the ‘extremes’, in the parlance of the quality press) balance one another, while the radical centre – the  bourgeois bloc  anatomized by Serge Halimi – is free to pursue its own interests, while also claiming to protect the dignity of the nation, wider humanity and now the ecosphere itself. A remarkable political formula, as [Gaetano] Mosca would have put it.” A bonapartist solution

“Rather than dividing the right from the left, migration splits both right and left formations internally. Upon gaining power, the only way for both left and right to resolve this tangle of contradictions is through hypocrisy: to adopt practices that contradict public proclamations. In reality, whoever is in government, it is always the labour market, in turn determined by relevant legislation, the business cycle and the geopolitical situation, that determines migration policies . Barbed wire

‘Israel has the right to defend itself against such heinous attacks,’ 

John Gray is considered an English philosopher.  According to the British journalist Francis Wheen, Gray “has published dozens of increasingly apocalyptic books and articles on the need to end the Enlightenment project forthwith.” Excerpts from ‘ The West yearns for Putin to fall. But what happens if the Russian state collapses?’ The New Statesman, July 28-August 17, 2023 “The West yearns for Putin to fall. But what happens if the Russian state collapses? If Ukrainian forces nonetheless fail to break through Russian positions, a frozen conflict becomes a realistic outcome. Western support is nearing exhaustion. Deindustrialised societies cannot sustain a protracted conflict when Russia is operating as a fully fledged war economy. The West is staking its endgame on regime change. What if that has the same result as it did in Iraq and Libya?” In the Russian Civil War of 1917-1921 “ Western military intervention involving British and other foreign troops exacerbated the bloodshed. As...

Why Europe clings to the colonial mindset

David Hearst.: “ Britain offered $2.7bn in arms to Ukraine and $6m in disaster relief for 23 million people in Turkey and Syria? Is this for real? Apparently yes. ” I think this is a simplistic argument, especially that Hearst does not explain the reasons. There are priorities that dictate the big powers policies, including the UK’s. And those priorities are not new and one needs to mention and explain them. Talking about ‘morality’ or ‘a moral duty’ is misleading and throwing dust in the eyes.

Source: The New Statesman  

“In the beginning, everyone we met was really helpful – and then the reality set in. I am grateful to them for saving our lives, but in this bargain, I’ve lost my dignity, my home and I’m very depressed,” says Rias. Reflecting on the racism they’ve faced in their first year in Europe

I liked the movie. In the original title ‘back’, not ‘skin’ is used.

Thirty-three years after the fall of the Berlin wall, bloc-thinking is back. The democratic “West” against the authoritarian “East”. Authoritarian alliances in the “West” recede into the backdrop, critique of liberal democracy’s chronic shadows grow silent. States recently accused of threatening democracy and the rule of law are embraced. They belong once again to the democratic “We”. With the war in Ukraine, authoritarianism in the “West” is externalized to the Putin regime. But authoritarian populism has been growing in Europe for a long time in the midst of liberal democracy, in states that claim to be illiberal, but not only there. The pandemic has intensified this neoliberal-authoritarian transformation. When uncertainties increase and bring about the compulsion to control, all sides take recourse to identitarianisms, as if there had never been a critique of it. If we want to understand democracy in a fundamentally different way — without the nation, without the people, without bl...