NM's blog

Chen Eason The United States has spent over $2.3 trillion on the war in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2022. What's achievement for US and Europe? Woody Grego Chen Eason  You forgot to mention they also killed 250,000 people and replaced the Taliban with the Taliban. Ned Ma Woody Grego  they did not replace the Taliban with Taliban. They were defeated and ran away. Taliban took over Kabul with an unprecended speed. The Afghan US-trained army was the first to run away. Britain is an ally of the most violent state in the world and it has a history too. It invaded Afghanistan 3 times, supported the fundamnetalist Mujahidin in the 1979 untill late 1980s. Woody Grego Ned Ma  O look its the Muslim who whines about how great Muslims have been for the UK now speaking as his true self just another Muslim from another sh!thole country. Ned Ma Woody Grego  Oh look! another prejudiced, bigot. I am not a Muslim or even religious at all. Those who cannot deal with the comment itself or ...

Resistance doesn’t follow electoral cycles or await the results of public opinion polls. Those who resist occupation do not ask whether their defiance is “appropriate” or “palatable”. That question itself reflects a deep ethical confusion — one that equates a subjugated people with the very power that oppresses them .

What is interesting in engaging with ChatGPT is not the answers themselves as the way it does generate them. My questions and comments are in red. _______________ “Human species, intractably divided on questions of value and definitions of the best regime.” How accurate is this? The quote —  “human species, intractably divided on questions of value and definitions of the best regime”  — is broadly accurate and reflects a deep tension in political philosophy, anthropology, and international relations. Here’s a breakdown of how and why this is accurate: Why it's accurate Historical Evidence Across history and cultures, humans have been deeply divided over: What constitutes justice (e.g., divine law vs. secular law). What makes a good society (e.g., hierarchy vs. equality, liberty vs. order). Who should rule (e.g., monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, technocracy). Competing Philosophical Traditions From  Plato and Aristotle  to  Rawls, Foucault, and Fanon , political...

History, or, to be more precise, the history we Germans have repeatedly mucked up, is a clogged toilet. We flush and flush, but the shit keeps rising. —Günter Grass, Crabwalk , quoted by Pankaj Mishra

Jean-Michel Aphatie : «  Chaque année, nous commémorons le massacre d’Oradour-sur-Glane, c’est-à-dire le massacre de tout un village. Mais nous en avons fait des centaines en Algérie. Est-ce qu’on en a conscience ?  »

History is key to explaining the origins of conflicts, but instead it’s widely used to justify them. Pushing back against distorted narratives, especially official ones, is a constant battle, but a vital one. —Benoît Bréville, Le Monde Diplomatique, December 2024

From an article available to subscribers “In  May 1945, soon after Germany surrendered, the French Institute of Public Opinion (IFOP) asked people which country they felt had contributed the most to its defeat. At the time, respondents were highly conscious of the millions of Soviet troops who had died on the eastern front and their decisive role in weakening the Nazi forces, as well as the United States’ late entry into the war: 57% chose the Soviet Union and only 20% the US. When IFOP asked the same question this year, the ratio was inverted: the US scored 60% against 25% for the Soviet Union. “For many years, D-Day was seen as a relatively minor event…  In 1964 De Gaulle himself refused to attend: ‘Why should I go and commemorate their landings when they were a prelude to a second occupation of France? I won’t do it!’ “That all changed in 1984 amid growing US-Soviet tension…  The countries of the ‘free world’ made a show of unity, presenting themselves as defenders of ...

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. —Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852

A very good piece by the historian Vincent Brown

The Zionist claim to return to the pre-diaspora past in the land of Israel was in practice the negation of the actual history of the Jewish people for more than 2,000 years. Zionism, or for that matter any modern nationalism, could not conceivably be a return to a lost past, because the sort of territorial nation-states with the sort of organization it envisaged simply did not exist before the nineteenth century. It had, in fact, to invent the history it claimed to bring to fruition. As Ernest Renan said a century ago: 'Getting history wrong is an essential part of being a nation.' It is the professional business of historians to dismantle such mythologies, unless they are content – and I am afraid national historians have often been – to be the servants of ideologists. —Hobsbawm, On History , 2013 ed., p. 21 and pp. 34-5

LSE aims at educating students From 2004 to the present Morris “claims objectivity , even if a careful reading of almost all of Morris’ writings reveals a very simplistic and one-dimensional view on the Jewish-Arab conflict.  Despite all his “discoveries” about moral wrongs perpetrated by the Israelis, on the bottom line, he always tended to adopt the official Israeli interpretation of the events . Morris devoted a very salient and extensive discussion to the centrality of idea of “transfer” (i.e., ethnic cleansing) in Zionist thought, but concluded that the Palestinians had not been expelled by the Israelis in compliance with a master plan or following a consequential policy. This was not precise. What the new material shows [– says Morris –] is that there were far more Israeli acts of massacre than I had previously thought. To my surprise, there were also many cases of rape…  They are just the tip of the iceberg." So far it is the “old good” and expected Morris. The restless...