Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“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

Sean Starrs’s key points : The global nature of US-led capitalism since 1945, and especially since the 1990s, means that some states can extract vast resources from others. GDP tells us where the world’s production of goods and services is geographically concentrated, but in the age of globalization, it does not tell us who owns and therefore profits from it. Global profit share is a more appropriate measure of national economic power, as it encompasses the global profits stemming from production and finance owned abroad, not just within the home territory. The global dominance of Wall Street (financial services in figure two), for example, helps to ensure that the US dollar remains the de facto world currency. The dominance of American tech firms helps to ensure the continued supremacy of the US military, while the dominance of American media helps to ensure that the US state can shape the ideological narrative (including support for US capitalism and imperialism). The United States c...

‘But we liberals are not responsible’.  This is just a brief comment as there are many things to say about the editorial. Notice the use of the word ‘imperialism’. Since when the Guardian uses such a term in its editorials? Imperialism did not apply to the ‘liberal order’ prior to Trump except in some articles in the opinion section. “Vance, Elon Musk and hard-right agitators such as Steve Bannon have a vision of a Europe run not by elected liberal-progressive coalitions but by people like themselves.” Trump and ‘new order’ have come out of a blue sky. We were sleeping. The morning after, there was Trump and an ‘illiberal order.”  No historical background, no sociology . The so-called liberal progressives were innocents in the room. They did not have blood in their hands. Nor did they preside over an imperialist international order. Selectivity. Perpetuating Amnesia. Ignoring structure and systemic analysis. Furthermore, their decades had not to do with the political-economic ...

Some critique of Mann’s concepts and analysis “The extensive mass murders of Communist states are problematic,” argues  scholar Martin Shaw  in his review of Mann’s  The Dark Side of Democracy . “Mann plausibly describes many of them as  classicide , because their targets were social classes, and explains them as ‘mistaken revolutionary projects’ rather than as ethnic conflict. But he also offers the perversion of socialism as a class variant of the more common ethnic perversion of democracy: ‘socialist ideals of democracy also became perverted as the  demos  became entwined with the term  proletariat , the working class, creating pressures to cleanse other classes.’ Along with the perversion of national democracy, this was then a second ‘general way in which democratic ideals were transmuted into murderous cleansing.’ However[,] we may question whether the idea of the proletariat (working class) was really a moving force in the perversion of Soviet de...

“[S]ectors of the populist or neo-Stalinist Left lament the fall of the Assad dictatorship . They present it — along with the rest of the “Axis of Resistance” led by the reactionary Iranian regime — as a progressive and anti-imperialist alternative. Some argue that the enemies of our enemy should be our allies, because they challenge ‘Western hegemony’. This completely ignores the class character of these powers. Rather than supporting the Palestinian cause or that of other oppressed people, these forces seek to oppose the reordering of the region for the further benefit of Israel and the United States because that would push them to the margins; at the same time they reconcile themselves with the pro-imperialist monarchies of the Gulf.”

In a region where colonialism, imperialism and authoritarianism are entangled in a web of interests, rebuilding Syria and developing a mass movement against Israel and US as well as an appeal to renew the spirit of 2010/2011 of overthrowing the rotten, authoritarian and crime-complicit regimes are inseparable. A ‘free Syria’ cannot be free in a sea of unfree region.  When I posted a comment similar to the above on alquds.co.uk, replying to an article by someone defending  the leader  of Hay’at Tahrir al Sham’s stance on Israel, my comment about the reactionary forces involved was censored and went unpublished. “For too long,” writes Hicham Safieddine , “the Assad regime invoked the conflict with Israel to justify its repressive measures against its people. Its opponents have long dared it to launch resistance in the Golan. Now that the opposition is in power, no such plan is in sight.” Thus  fighting colonialism and authoritarianism should not be exclusive. The curre...

The main task of imperialism in our time is to prevent, or, if that is impossible, to slow down and control the economic development of underdeveloped countries.  While there have been vast differences among underdeveloped countries. The underdeveloped world as a whole has continually shipped a large part of its economic surplus to more advanced countries on account of interest and dividends. The worst of it is, however, that it is very difficult to say what has been the greater evil as far as the economic development of underdeveloped countries is concerned: the removal of their economic surplus by foreign capital or its reinvestment by foreign enterprise. — Paul Baran, The Political Economy of Growth, 1957

No nation can be free if it oppresses other nations.  —  Lenin  referring to an earlier statement by Marx. “[I]t was the combined effects of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the subsequent wave of globalization, and Washington’s aggressive drive for a unipolar order that led to much more open denials of imperialism on the left. Ironically, at a time when liberals were celebrating a new naked imperialism, much of the global left jettisoned all critical notions of imperialism theory, even, in some cases, offering support for the new empire ideology.  Here the ideological hegemony exerted by capital over the Western left was on full display. [with its derivatives and distractions: identity politics, ‘democracy promotion’, ‘the threat of Islam’, ‘humanitarian intervention’, expansion of NATO, ‘it’s in their culture’, ‘saving Muslim women’, ‘we are all middle class now’, ‘human rights’, liberal feminism, celebrity culture …] “[T]he gap between the views of imperialism...

While one can understand that the positive reactions to the assassination by Syrians opposed to the Syrian regime are a form of revenge because of Hezbollah’s complicity, the context surrounding the current moment, matters. We have to be clear, Israel’s war against Lebanon is not to promote the freedom of Syrians or any other population in the region suffering from authoritarian states. With this in mind, Palestinians and Lebanese people have the right to resist Israel’s racist, colonial apartheid state violence, including through military resistance. This includes the right of Hezbollah and Hamas, which are the main actors involved in the armed confrontation with the Israeli occupation army, to resist.” Joseph Daher explains why celebrating Israel's assassination Hezbollah's Nasrallah is short sighted when it comes to Syrians’ struggle against Assad's regime.

Prophetic and timely Alain Badiou, June 1982 I don't much like to speak about the jewish question', as did Marx and Sartre, because the absolute atrocities the Nazis committed in the name of the 'final solution' have adversely rebounded on the very notion that there is a 'question' to which it would be appropriate to give a response. I might add that, on this issue, one ought to speak, absolutely, in one's own name, with one's own voice. As regards questions, I start from this: there are Jews. I do not ask why there are, nor where they come from, because such stories of origin and provenance are in themselves dubious. ‘Jews' is the name of our real, a glorious name of our history – especially of our philosophical, scientific, artistic and our revolutionary history. And I say this: Hitler proposed to eliminate Jews in their physicality. His will was completely criminal, including what of such a crime must remain hidden, clandestine. The Nazi administr...

This will not happen soon, Cori, especially when accommodating voices, if not complicit ones, of people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are betraying their own principles. But in exposing the crimes and the complicity in crimes of power and wealth,   words of defiance against nefarious outfits   are always needed.

Interview with Kevin B. Anderson Related A multi-polarity: a new alignment?

One doesn’t have to agree with all the arguments  in this article , but there are quite valid ones.

José Martí lived for much of his life as an exile in the United States.  Here is what he said about the US:  I know the Monster, because I have lived in its lair – and my weapon is only the slingshot of David.

Excellent! Is there continuity? Useful artifacts for understanding the imperialist worldview

For this a leading American professor has been placed in leave. “Who could not feel energized seeing oppressed people bulldozing the fences enclosing them, taking to the skies in escape, and flying freely through the air? Imperialists and Zionists reduce October 7 to a list of horrors not simply to block from view the history and reality of colonialism, occupation, and siege. They do it to prevent the gap of the disruption from producing the subject that caused it. Hamas wasn’t the subject of the October 7 action; it was an agent hoping that the subject would emerge as an effect of its action, the latest instantiation of the Palestinian revolution. More often than not, though, left intellectuals echo the condemnations that imperialist states make the condition for speaking about Palestine. In so doing, they take a side against the Palestinian revolution, giving a progressive face to the repression of the Palestinian political project, and betraying the anti-imperialist aspirations of a...

“ Why do the majority of Western mainstream media outlets continue to adopt and defend the Israeli narrative? Why is there a tendency towards dehumanising Palestinians and placing disproportionate blame upon them for current events? What interests do Western mainstream media organisations have in maintaining this type of coverage?”

“It is … urgent to re-examine the Derna tragedy in light of a long history of colonialism, confiscation of natural resources and destruction of living and non-living things for Western hegemonic purposes via war and militarism.” Related When you hear the buzzwords ‘our way of life’, ‘our values’, ‘democracy or authoritarianism’, not to mention ‘there is a jungle over there’ (Josep Borrell), ‘wasps in the Middle East’ (Thomas Friedman), ‘terrorism’, etc. think of this: The Imperial Mode of Living

Emmeline Pankhurst, probably the most venerated in the mainstream British media, defended the presence and reach of the British Empire:  Some talk about the Empire and Imperialism as if it were something to decry and something to be ashamed of. [I]t is a great thing to be the inheritors of an Empire like ours ... great in territory, great in potential wealth. ... If we can only realise and use that potential wealth we can destroy thereby poverty, we can remove and destroy ignorance. For years she travelled around England and North America, rallying support for the British Empire and warning audiences about the dangers of Bolshevism. —Quoted in Purvis, June, Emmeline Pankhurst: A Biography , London 2002, p. 312 Why is a London School of Economics’s building named after her?   There is a Memorial of her in Victoria Tower Gardens, south of Victoria Tower at the southwest corner of the Palace of Westminster

Au lieu de a book In one sense, there is nothing extraordinary about this Zionist brutality. It is not, in its geo-political structure, very different from other imperialisms with which it shared during the 19th and 20th centuries. Of course Israel came to play a unique role in the world: its colon status on behalf of England and the United States marked a considerable aspect of its future course. But in its sense of entitlement to the land, resources and lives of another people, it merely replicated the horror of European and even American assumptions of superiority and secularized “divine right.” Crimes and state terror committed by the British and American imperialisms, the Zionist organisations, the ‘United Nations’ and the state of Israel