Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

It is good to stay up to date with 'geopolitics', but political science without political economy does not reveal a more accurate picture of the world.

80 years since liberation from Nazi-fascism

By Marc Scully 22 April 2025 Pope Francis has died and eulogies are pouring in praising his concern for the poor, marginalized and dispossessed. Tell that to the thousands of young boys molested and sexually assaulted by Catholic priests. Pope Francis was supposed to clean up that criminality against children in the church but he did not and it prevails. Cleaning it up would have required turning offenders over to civil authorities for prosecution but Pope Francis continued to protect them. Pope Francis had an avuncular persona but contrary to the eulogies he does not have an inspiring history when it comes to standing with the oppressed. Serious questions remain about his role during Argentina's Dirty War, an anti-communist rampage under the military junta from 1976 to 1983 when at least 30,000 people were disappeared or killed in the most barbaric ways like pushing them out of airplanes over the ocean. Those questions about Pope Francis' role don't go away and it isn'...

 

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 .

“There can for present purposes be no question that there is sufficient evidence that the UAE is not only failing to prevent genocide, but is also complicit in genocide .”

Camilla Vallejo has made  anti-Zionist  remarks during her political career. In 2016 she called  Israel  "a terrorist State that seeks the displacement and extermination of Palestinians", and that the " Palestinian–Israeli conflict does  not constitute a war, but a genocide". She stated that "[t]his is not about  antisemitism  ... I emphatically condemn ... the impunity of a Zionist project that violates all international law, that seeks to oppress and exterminate a brother nation.”

Pankaj Mishra, author of The World After Gaza : “If you are going to remain a person with a conscience, then you've got to reconsider many of your alliances and professional relationships, or you stay within those institutions and become dead inside.” Pankaj, you have stirred your finger in my wound, as I carry on being complicit in genocide unable to break away from the web I am entangled in.

Marco D’Eramo We are growing habituated to the savagery, day by day. Then we wonder how the Germans could have ignored the genocide that was being perpetrated all round them. We, unbending guardians of Western values, implacable defenders of international law: we dine on mass murder  bien chambré . We are deeply pained by the deaths of ‘innocent civilians’, of course, saddened by the hospitals razed to the ground. Our hearts go out to the ragamuffins with no future who assail the few aid trucks that reach the Strip. We are distressed by the number of journalists being slaughtered. But the ‘humanitarian catastrophe’ in Gaza does not stop us sleeping at night, even as the situation worsens week by week. We supply the bombs and we feel sorry for their victims. Call it compassionate bombing. It is little wonder that the global South finds the West hypocritical. This would be less apparent if the Israeli government and its supporters would simply state outright that Israel has the right...

Consider your complicity in Gaza genocide this Eid

“Marc*: “We believe that there is no material problem … that cannot be solved by more technology. We had a problem of starvation, so we invented the Green Revolution.”  Göran**: “Sixty years after the Green Revolution, around 733 million people were hungry and undernourished in 2023, according to the World Health Organization — an increase of 152 million since 2019.” Marc: “We had a problem of darkness, so we invented electric lighting.”  Göran: “Almost half of sub-Saharan Africans — 600 million — live without electricity.” Marc: “We had a problem of cold, so we invented indoor heating.”  Göran: “There is still a pattern of increased winter mortality in the UK.“ Marc: “We had a problem of isolation, so we invented the Internet.”  Göran: “Social isolation remains a debilitating human condition.” Marc: “We had a problem of pandemics, so we invented vaccines.”  Göran: “Excess mortality as a result of COVID-19 has been found to cor...

—Siyavash Shahabi  on  March 26, 2025 Recommended  Liberalism – A Counter-History by Domenico Lesurdo

 Starmer says cost of sickness and disability benefits ‘devastating’ One of the richest economies in the world has been disable for a while: low or no economic growth. A capitalist economy which is dominated by the private sector and cannot resume growth. Who should the capitalist government go after to save money? The vulnerable.  Meanwhile, a man who used to earn 142 times the average salary of a nurse is lecturing British boys how to be ‘role models’ . Shouldn't he be at least attacking the British regime and the culture that is complicit in mass killing of Palestinians?

As anthropologist Giorgio Gristina  argues ,  there is a  more dark, disturbed, militaristic or violent tone that can be found in Israeli psytrance, in the names of albums, artists or events like Expression of Rage, Psycho Sonic, Deeply Disturbed, Becoming Insane, Smashing the Opponent, Conquering the Israeli Desert, Groove Attack, We’re Dangerous, We Must Evacuate, Ground Zero, NuClear Visions of Israel and so on. “The reality is that  psytrance  is the soundtrack to Israel’s genocide. “Australian doofs have a very different political aesthetic, which reflects the more progressive outlook of most organizers and participants. Most doofs begin with a welcome to country or smoking ceremony given by the traditional indigenous owners of the land on which the festival is held. Festival organizers draw on indigenous Australian practices and traditions to impress upon patrons a connection to the land and support for Aboriginal sovereignty, to encourage respectful behav...

“ The political and moral deformations and intellectual helplessness of Germany today are more dangerous than at any other time since 1945…  The country that laid waste the moral structure of western society looks feeble again before the economic crises and social breakdowns of capitalism that first produced fascism. Revealingly, the binary of the enlightened west and unenlightened east – once used to authorise the Nazi quest for  Lebensraum  in the east and then adapted to serve cold war policy agendas – is the currency today of far-right nationalists across Israel, Europe and America…  And there was much about western democracies – especially their foundations in white supremacy, and cultures of racism and antisemitism – that allowed Hitler to believe that they would welcome his extermination of Jews.” Related The new German chauvinism  ( an essay in two parts) Germany's reckoning with its past is no longer a model

Sudan takes UAE to the ICJ Related UAE 2024

“[O]ver time, Holocaust memory in Germany progressively transformed into a policy of unconditional support for Israel. What was once an example of historical reckoning has become a framework that, in my view, contributes to the erasure of critical perspectives and enables actions that contradict the very principles of justice and accountability that this memory was meant to uphold. “The focus on the Holocaust, while important, has overshadowed or minimized the memory of colonialism, creating a tension that became more apparent after October 7. “This ‘aporetic’ memory politics is the premise for ignoring the colonial dimension of Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. In the German and Western European discourse, Netanyahu is depicted as the representative of the Jews as victims. Therefore, Palestinians are not a dispossessed people, but a new embodiment of antisemitism. “Germany is today complicit in the genocide in Gaza, just like France, Italy, and the UK. However, Germany’s ...

Why, at a time when,  according  to Oxfam, "more women and children are killed in Gaza by Israeli military than any other recent conflict in a single year", should Israel suddenly care about the fate of Iranian women ? At a time when the entire world is aghast and nauseated at the Israeli  savagery in Gaza  and the rest of  Palestine , and as the Israeli army – fully funded and equipped by the US, UK  and  Germany  – is acting like a mad beast attacking  Lebanon ,  Syria , and  Yemen , with repeated provocations against Iran, why would Israel turn to Nafisi and how she assembled, as she claims, a few young Iranian women to read Vladimir Nabokov's  pornographic novel  with them? 

Leftist Organicism There was a leftist version, though the inter-war emergence of  organicism was slower and less thorough on the Left. The new USSR  quickly embraced the statism that pre-war socialist and especially  communist movements had denounced. 20 By September 1918, the  independence of the soviets, the unions and the law was almost gone, the Cheka secret police was into its first murders, ‘merciless extermination’ was declared to be the fate of the kulak class enemy, concentration camps were built and the ‘Red Terror’ had been formally inaugurated. Statism was seen more as political necessity than moral principle—unlike extreme rightism. Nonetheless, some Bolshevik language had begun to resemble fascist language. Trotsky made a famous speech with a decidedly fascist title: ‘Work, Discipline and Order Will Save the Soviet Socialist Republic’. He also sometimes praised paramilitary virtues: economic problems, he declared, had to be ‘stormed’ with ‘disciplined...