Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

A story that reminds me how I was brave under a police state, how I confronted it, got tortured, etc and became a coward in “liberal democracy.” “My mother taught me we are far from the rational creatures we think we are, and that a loaf of bread will bring two people closer than all the world's philosophies combined. She taught that community is not an intellectual construct, but a performative one. The refusal to condemn is not simply to refuse the ‘good Muslim’ label - it is a resistance of our yearning to be seen by Power. To refuse to condemn, then, is to face the fear of mobilising on our own terms. There is no bravery without cowardice, no strength without vulnerability, no wisdom without ignorance. Insofar as the two drives of the world stand at their strongest - that is, capitalism and nationalism - our intentions will always waver between our desire to please God and Power. Why I no longer play ‘the good Muslim’

 “No piece of land is worth” I think that’s an underestimation of the role of property in conflicts whether between states or classes or among the marginalised. And the case of the Armenians, the Turkish genocide is in the collective memory. Enmity has a longer history in the “imagined community” than 30/40 years ago.

A new publication The Sultan’s Communists: Moroccan Jews and the Politics of Belonging

“The essential thing is the interplay between fatality, technology, and capitalism” set the stage for nationalism/the modern nation. Excerpts from one of my favourite books Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

The article was written on 24 of March. A couple of figures are not up-to-date. Covid-19 Pandemic will change everything—for better or worse

I am in the last third of China Transformed by R. Bin Wong. It is a very good book.

"Many international commentators continue to present the war in Yemen through the lens of Saudi Arabian intervention or sectarian conflict, [or both]. In essence, Yemeni internal stability has been undermined by widespread political disenfranchisement and socio-economic marginalisation. The Houthis exploited this alienation, which was not merely sectarian – many Zaydi Shiites rejected their message as anachronistic and anti-democratic, while many Sunnis shared their non-sectarian resentments." So far so good. But, like in Syria, it is convenient to give predominance to "sectarianism." It is good for both imperialism and "Western" public consumption. Note: Al-Arabiya is an arm of the Saudi propaganda machine. For that obvious reason there is no mention of the Saudi, and the Emirati, crimes in Yemen. That does not invalidate the analysis that the conflict is originally 'a homegrown affair."  The war in Yemen is a homegrown affair Relate

"Europe's so-called migration crisis can be understood as a fierce and multi-sided transnational social conflict of which racism and racist forces are one part. In order to understand racism in Europe today, then, it is productive to analyse the social struggles and structural contradictions associated with migration and border regimes which are shaped by racism and in turn shape racism's dynamic." The Role of Racism in the European "Migration Crisis" A must read

Alongside the conservative nationalism of the right, which emphasises tradition, religion or ethnicity, there are liberal nationalisms that can be just as powerful and as exclusionary. Think of the way that British governments, from the 1990s on, have made a forceful distinction between deserving and undeserving migrants: for instance, in policing access to the welfare state. Or of the way in which supposedly European values of tolerance and free speech are deployed in order to stigmatise outsiders who, for religious or cultural reasons, are assumed not to share them. 'Protecting the European way of life' from migrants

The nation-state: e.g. Britain "The liberal-nationalist hope is always that one can have the fantasy of social harmony and enjoying-together without the exclusionary Othering. Even if nations are, by definition, exclusive, the hope is that they need not be chauvinist about it." "Behead those who insult the nation-state"

Britain's National Breakdown Over Brexit (Written before Johnson became PM)

Enzo Traverso says, "the Stalinist legacy, made up of a mountain of ruins and dead, did not erase the origins of communism in the tradition of the Enlightenment and eighteenth-century rationalist humanism. 
By contrast,  "[N]ationalism and imperialism, Pan-Germanism and the idea of `living space', `redemptive' anti-Semitism and racism, eugenics and extermination of the `lower races', hatred of the left and charismatic dictatorship are tendencies that had appeared, in more or less developed forms, from the end of the nineteenth century on. Nazism did not create them, it simply radicalized them. 
If Nazism achieved a fusion of three different struggles - a colonial assault on the Slavic world, a political struggle against communism and the Soviet Union, and a racial fight against the Jews - into a unique war of conquest and extermination, this means that its model could not be Bolshevism. It would be more relevant and coherent to find its `model' in the col

Stephen Rosen: “[W]hat is nationalism? And what nationalism is actually Western invention. Imperial China had no nationalism. Where do they get their ideas of nationalism? Well, they got their ideas of nationalism from the Japanese, which emerged as a national state in the 19 [century].  Well, where did the Japanese get their ideas about nationalism, which were then translated into Chinese? They got it from the Germans. So what they imported was a 19th-century version of social Darwinism in which race  is of the fundamental basis of nationality and there are very – when you hear Xi Jinping [a communist/Marxist?] and other Chinese leaders talking about cultural pollution, when you talk about the natural affinity of all Chinese people wherever they are, you begin to worry that there is this submerged, and sometimes not even so, some racialist component.” — The historian Lord Acton put  the case against "nationalism as insanity" in 1862. Bertrand Russell  criticizes nationalis

Tureky's position on Venezuela I wouldn't describe the current Brazilian regime as fascist though. It is a racist, far right regime with fascistic tendencies, but it is not fascist .

If no bases for a ‘new nationalism’ have yet disclosed themselves, why are politicians so desperate to assert one? Could it be because nationalism empowers politicians to police culture? Or, more accurately, to culturalise social questions , which are then policed? Labour and new patriotism

"Today's nostalgia has become an engine of nationalism. It thrives on the economic and cultural insecurities thrown up by globalisation. We look backwards for a safe identity."  — Philip Stephens, Financial Times, 26/07/208

"It is not capitalism that is the problem in Habermas’s Europe, but its management. What is wrong with the Europe of monetary union, Habermas implies, is not that it is pro-capitalist, or subservient to capitalist interests, but that it is – contingently – non-democratic, thereby subverting the struggle against the real enemy, nationalism. Democracy is to correct this by making the demands of ordinary people heard as decision makers attend to ‘systemic demands’, refilling the system’s supply of legitimacy. No need to confront the increasingly insatiable demands of the profit-dependent classes for precedence of their interests over those of the rest of society. In fact class interests do not really appear in Habermasian European theory, only biased cognitions of decision makers in need of democratic correction."  A critique of Jürgen Habermas's democratic Europe

A good take on Putin's Russia with no mention of Syria.  A bit soft on the American-led political-economy of "inevitability".  "Americans and Europeans have been guided through our new century by what I will call  the politics of inevitability  – a sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing really to be done. In the American, capitalist version of this story, nature brought the market, which brought democracy, which brought happiness. In the European version, history brought the nation, which learned from war that peace was good, and hence chose integration and prosperity." "Vladimir Putin's politics of eternity"

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. —George Orwell

Germany "The neoliberal bourgeoisie no longer acts according to the rules of classical Marxism. The CEOs of the DAX 30 companies will not suddenly arrive like Batman to save centrist politics. The economic elite is, after all, the client of the state – always dependent on handouts, outsourcing, deregulation and implicit subsidies. Both Trump and Brexit show: the corporate elite will take what it they are given – and they usually learn to like it. So the German left must outline a new long-term strategy . The first question is: what does it mean to be progressive in 21st century Germany? At a micro-level this is answered every day by the altruistic actions of young people and trade unionists: to do volunteer work with migrants and refugees; to attend democratic political and cultural events; to cycle and to recycle; to uphold the rights of women, ethnic minorities and gay people. To confront unflinchingly the memory of the Holocaust. To trace, as the Marxist philosopher Geo