Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

By Richard Seymour Disasters are supposed to pull us together. They are supposed to produce a wave of euphoria among survivors once the worst has passed, forging in the ruins a ‘city of comrades’. Rebecca Solnit shows us how disasters can spawn ‘disaster communities’ and even, by disrupting the ordinary misery and alienation of daily life, inflame utopian desires.  It isn’t necessarily so. A ‘city of comrades’ is only likely to appear in special circumstances, where the disaster doesn’t disperse the community, where the community was not already split along multiple faultlines (class, race, religion), where there were already traditions of self-help, mutualism and solidarity, and – in some instances – where the disaster is not inflicted by other human beings. What happens when the misery is ‘anthropogenic’, the resources for self-help are negligible, social trust is in the gutter, and the expected reflexes of decency and charity fail to materialise? In his work on disasters over se...

A must-read book Richard Seymour, 2024 The pseudo-insurrection in Washington, DC, on 6 January 2021, intended to stop a supposed theft of the presidential election and restore Trump to power, was fantasy putschism minted by online disinfotainment: Caesarism for the QAnon “generation. But it was not the last of its kind. In the space of less than a year, an alleged coup attempt by the neo-Nazi Reichsbürger movement in Germany was thwarted, supporters of Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro stormed government buildings in the hope of triggering ‘intervenção militar’ (military intervention), and the Russian paramilitary Wagner Group marched halfway to Moscow to force out the military leadership they blame for betraying the war on Ukraine. In every case, the pseudo-insurrection was justified by conspiracist paranoia. Mass violence in other forms, each motivated by its own fantasies of doom and redemption, has been enabled by national governments. In the Philippines, the line between police m...

One o f the lessons o f the Hitler period is the stupidity of cleverness.  How many were the expert arguments with which Jews dismissed the likelihood  of Hitler's rise, when it was already as clear as daylight. I recall a  conversation with an economist who demonstrated the impossibility of  Germany's militarization from the interests of Bavarian brewers. And in  any case, according to the clever people, fascism was impossible in the  West. Clever people have always made things easy for barbarians, because they are so stupid.  It is the well-informed, farsighted judgments, the prognoses  based on statistics and experience, the observations which begin: "I  happen to be an expert in this field," it is the well-founded, conclusive  statements which are untrue. Hitler was against intellect and humanity. But there is also an intellect  which is against humanity: it is distinguished by well-informed superiority. —Max Horkheimer and Theo...

What Sinclair Lewis “is trying to do here is to trace the way these ideologies develop and how the negligence of liberal or tolerant ‘ordinary’ people allows monsters to emerge. What he’s also keen to do is to illustrate just how seemingly civilised, decent people can transform into brutal oppressors when they are given permission to behave in that way. “But this is not an issue that is exclusive to Trump’s rise in the USA. What Lewis has to tell us might well apply equally to the rise of the populist Right in Poland, Hungary, Holland, Italy and France. It should also have echoes for us here in the UK as we try and understand the way in which a populist Right is being allowed to set the political agenda – Brexit and all.”

“We are living through a moment when the ‘F’ word is no longer taboo and the threat of fascism lurks everywhere.”  Alberto Toscano “reminds us that liberalism is no enemy of fascism , and fascists flower in the hot house of capitalism.”

This is only one of the ways and it should not be the only one. The twentieth-century anti-fascist movements from Germany to Spain to Chile also have many lessons to learn from. Change won’t come through conventional politics but by circumventing it

Politically and intellectually bankrupt

Harris or Trump will soon occupy the most violent elected office in their homeland (and the world). Trump and Harris “are destroying what is left of the democratic institutions of this country.” ‘Democratic institutions’? When were they ‘democratic’?  “ The existing two parties are identical in their genocidal militarism and backing of the Israeli settler colony, with one openly planning its  fascist takeover  of the entire country.”  The 50/60 per cent of eligible Americans who do vote “are conditioned by the commercial logic of their degenerate capitalism to choose between Coke and Pepsi, McDonald's and KFC, Nike and Reebok, Apple and Samsung, or Trump and Harris.” I have always liked Dabashi’s articles . I fear though he is sliding into repeating sentences with different words and tone.

I don’t think we can talk about ‘hypocrisy’ anymore. It has been normalised as part of ‘our values’. It is not a negative feature. I don’t agree with the two state solution implied in the article.

Bella Ciao

Free yourselves from the indoctrination presented to you as innate knowledge. My generation lived through war and fascism. Through this experience, we reached the conclusion that there should never be war again. My generation experienced fascism, which at first we accepted. We didn’t know about what was going on in the concentration camps — there were no Jews in my Pomeranian village, and we didn’t know what was happening to Jewish people. These were all realizations that I had to come to later. It was then that I came to the conclusion that this fascism — which was, of course, also an outgrowth from humanity — had an economic base supporting it. Where did the cannons come from, who built the bombers, who desired this? And who is alive today and profiting from war? Where do new developments come from? Anyone sitting in their car today with their sat nav should be aware that this is a by-product of the production of weapons for war. So, the only advice I can give is to critically qu...

Ideological affinities and a long intellectual history lie behind the curious reverence for the Syrian dictator among fascists and white nationalists Related Syria and the ‘anti-imperialism’ of fools

A communist life

“Liberalism’s  dogged insistence on nonviolence  and other manifestations of bourgeois respectability further falsely render antifascist self-defense and anti-colonial rebellion indistinguishable from fascist and imperialist belligerence, implicitly (or explicitly) condoning the state and para-state violence that typifies the latter.”

The book still speaks about today’s America

This book [ Genocide in Libya ] is not meant to be conclusive, but to bring out Libya and Libya’s brutal, genocidal colonial history. And to get rid of that common and really absurd way of thinking that goes “I don’t know anything about Libya, so I’m going to talk about tribalism, I’m going to talk about [Muammar] al-Qaddafi, about regionalism or religion.” Who doesn’t have regions? Who doesn’t have these social complexities? An interview with Ali Abdullatif Ahmida Related There was no a Nuremberg trials for Italian fascists

Written after Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man and Huntington’s Class of Civilisations , but before the ‘war on terror’, the war in Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq, the rise of China, the 2008/09 Great Recession, the Arab uprisings, the rise of the far right, the Russian invasion of Ukraine. ————- Why then do the European states claim for themselves the right to spread civilization and manners to different continents? Why not to Europe itself? – Joseph Roth, 1937 “Modern democracy, like the nation-state it is so closely associated with, is basically the product of the protracted domestic and international experimentation which followed the collapse of the old European order in 1914. In the short run, both Wilson and Lenin failed to build the ‘better world’ they dreamed of. The communist revolution across Europe did not materialize, and the building of socialism was confined to the Soviet Union; the crisis of liberal democracy followed soon after as one country after an...

The forgotten Arab Republicans

  The Great Transformation and the Countermovement to Capitalism

  Is it possible to stop people from becoming fascists?