Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Marco D’Eramo is excellent as usual. ‘It’s been a good day; I never dine better, I never sleep so peacefully, as when I have sullied myself sufficiently with what idiots call crimes.’ —Marquis de Sade, La philosophie dans le boudoir 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. This is a close cousin of greenwashing: we supply the bombs and we feel sorry for their victims. Call it compassionate bombing. [See, for instance, David Cameron’s and Emmanuel Macron’s tears] It is little wonder that the global South finds the West hypocritical. Denial is exercised when actions can only be performed if we deny to ourselves that we are doing them. Hypocrisy becomes all the more necessary when it comes to public opinion – its growth has been a fruit of the formation of public opinion , and has become an indispensable tool of politics. Perhaps today Westerners, and not only Germans, s...

" There is a striking discrepancy between the lack of feeling aroused by the deaths of tens of thousands of human beings—in their majority anonymous, unrecorded by the authorities and denied the dignity of a proper burial—with that excited by, say, the 1,000 lives lost in the crossing from East to West Germany during the Cold War. There is one obvious explanation: an African, an Arab or an Afghani who drowns in the Mediterranean, in flight from war, oppression or extreme poverty, is not seen as a human being in the same way as the Germans who were trying to flee ‘communism’ and were hailed as martyrs for liberty." — Stathis Kouvelakis Europe's Iron Curtain

Sometimes you find surprises in the gutter press " But not every part of the resistance was grateful. De Gaulle’s supporters in Paris  feared either a communist seizure of power or a mirror of the bloodbath that was befalling the August 1944 Warsaw Uprising. Through the Swedish consul they negotiated a truce with the German military governor on 20 August, but this was not observed by the insurgents who threw up barricades in a revolutionary reflex and continued guerrilla warfare, seizing weapons from the panicking Germans." The forgotten heroes of Paris, 1945

Hopping in his Matchbox