Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

By Richard Seymour At the origin of modern political conspiracism lies a myth of subversive power, first fabricated in response to the French revolution. In 1797, two books appeared simultaneously. These were Abbé Barruel’s five-volume Mémoire pour servietterr à l’histoire du jacobinisme, and John Robison’s Proofs of a conspiracy against all the religions and governments of Europe, carried on in the secret meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati and Reading Societies. Both attributed the revolution to a centuries-old conspiracy of secret societies (from the Order of Templars to the Freemasons), responsible for an assault on religion and political authority. This theory of totalitarianism avanta la laettere is the template from which modern conspiracy narratives – from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the ‘New World Order’ – are cut. Conspiracy theory today, says Fredric Jameson, is an attempt to represent the ‘social totality’ at the level of fantasy in a way that evades ‘liberal an...

By Richard Seymour On the one hand, it is obvious that the recent rise of right-wing nationalism has something to do with the economy, and specifically with the global financial crash of 2008. The electoral record in Europe between 1870 and 2014 suggests that voters generally respond to financial crises by moving to the right, with the far right gaining the most. On average, far-right parties increase their vote share by 30 per cent after such a crisis. On the other hand, decades of research have failed to find any evidence that voters respond to personal economic suffering by punishing the incumbent. Belonging to a group whose economic interests have been directly harmed seems only rarely to change political preferences. We are passionate animals. Passion, as Karl Marx wrote, is our ‘essential force’. To understand what’s happening today, we must return to the passions. Among the passions, the most important for this chapter is resentment. For good reasons, resentment is seen as a dis...

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...

Written in the immediate aftermath of WWII. I think some arguments/theses are still relevant in tackling a complex and broad subject such as nationalism. Whether in India, US, Israel, England, Germany or Russia the worst features of nationalism are there – more or less and in different degrees. ********* ‘Patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige,  not  for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality. The nationalist does not go on the principle of simply ganging up with the strongest side. On the contrary, having picked his side, he persuades himself that it  is the stronge...

In the ‘New World’ “deliberate genocidal bursts were more common among British than Spanish or Portuguese settlers. In both cases, we find that the stronger the democracy among the perpetrators, the greater the genocide.” The organic nationalists such the young Austrians argued for an organic conception of the people and state. Conflict – be it conflict of interet or class conflict – was to be transcended, for the people are indivisible and united.  Thus “late-nineteenth-century minorities in the East came under increasing pressure, leading through induced to coerced assimilation and thence to coerced emigration. Jews took the brunt of the pressure “During the nineteenth century, every Ottoman Turkish defeat in Europe resulted in mass flight and many killings of Muslims.” Settlers and Their Victims I note two persistent features of the colonial dark side. First, the settlers often enjoyed de facto local self-rule—whatever the constitution said. For the period, these were distinctly...

This is an excellent taster of the book  

[The following is a crucial historical analysis focusing on nationalism. With the demise of the Ba’ath nationalism in Syria, are we witnessing a triumph of a version of Islamist nationalism? Is it an emancipatory nationalism, a nationalism subordinated to class, social justice, women liberation, or just another instrumentalist nationalism – a bourgeois nationalism of the state veiled in religion and led by pious ‘middle men’ at the service of neocolonial powers and capital?]   Nation Against State: Popular Nationalism and the Syrian Uprising (1) [The Bourgeoisie has] come to power in the name of a narrow nationalism […]; they will prove themselves incapable of triumphantly putting into practice a programme with even a minimum humanist content […]. —Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1963) The current Syrian revolts “One, one, one, the Syrian people are one!” In 2011, this was one of the most popular chants during protests. Syrians used it to counter the sectarian discourse o...