Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

  The Popular Revolutionary Alternative

Time is not on our side

NATO returns to Libya to challenge Russia

"There is a powerful impulse within the electorates of the NATO states for their governments to give a lead to the world and really help the less fortunate overwhelming majority of humanity to improve their lives and strengthen their security and welfare. But we must bear in mind two unfortunate facts: first, that the NATO states have been and are hell-bent on exacerbating the inequalities of power and wealth in the world, on destroying all challenges to their overwhelming military and economic power and on subordinating almost all other considerations to these goals; and second, the NATO states are finding it extraordinarily easy to manipulate their domestic electorates into believing that these states are indeed leading the world’s population towards a more just and humane future when, in reality, they are doing no such thing."  —Peter Gowan, NLR, March-April 1999

The BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) "1. The domestic policies of the BRICS states follow the general tenor of what one might consider Neoliberalism with Southern Characteristics. 2. The BRICS alliance has not been able to create a new institutional foundation for its emergent authority. It continues to plead for a more democratic United Nations, and for more democracy at the IMF and the World Bank. 3. The BRICS formation has not endorsed an ideological alternative to neoliberalism. 4. Finally, the BRICS project has no ability to sequester the military dominance of the United States and NATO... The force-projection of the United States remains planetary. If we look into the entrails of the system, we will find that its solutions do not lie within it. Its problems are not technical, nor are they cultural. They are social problems that require political solutions. The social order of property, propriety, and power has to be radically revised..."

The Swedish model? By 1980 Sweden had the lowest income and gender inequality in the world. As a result of the neoliberal capitalist reforms from mid-1980s, "The current Swedish income distribution bears some resemblance to the English one of 1688. The average member of the richest 0.1 per cent has a disposable income, after tax and transfers, 38 times greater than that of the median-income earner. At the time of the ‘Glorious Revolution’, England’s temporal lords had an income 30 times that of urban middleclass merchants and traders."  Angust Maddison, Contours of World Economy, 1-2030 AD,   Oxford 2007, pp. 278-9 Wealth distribution has worsened even more, resulting in the most uneven pattern to be found in Western Europe, on a par with those of Brazil, South Africa or the  USA.  In 2002, Sweden’s top 1 per cent owned 18 per cent of all household wealth; by 2017, it had risen to 42 per cent. The National Education Authority (Skolverket) has found that a quarter of

"Wood’s narrative pokes a finger in the eye of most pat thinking on the subject by trying not to center Putin in its analysis. Putin of course still dominates the book, though not in the same cartoon supervillain style that predominates in most political writing today. But Wood is at pains to stress that he is simply one part of a larger system of oligarchic authoritarianism inherited not from Communism but the Boris Yeltsin years, when the ex-Soviet Union was buried under a mass of radical neoliberal reforms that spread grinding misery throughout the country and left it a shriveled husk of what it had been before 1991." Russia beyond supervillain

How "liberation" is brought about. A dictator was toppled and killed 7 years ago with the help of imperialist powers. Hypocritical powers, which sometimes opposed him, other times befriended him, turned "humanist". Hypocrisy that would manifest itself more openly with the very same powers towards the Assad regime. A Syrian regime which reacted towards a peaceful uprising with much more brutal force. Although the summary below is called "the big picture", it does not include any geo-political background: the charecteristics of the relationship between the major Western powers, namely the US, Britain, France, Italy, Russia, and the Gaddafi regime. "The big picture" does not include the nature of the regime and the place of Libya in Africa and among the Arab countries, its oil, etc. Why did the major imperialist powers protect the Egyptian regime, but not the Libyan one?  The Death of Gaddafi

With the inability of the state to invest, large-scale plunder has taken place. Also, complicity in crimes with the U.S. Anti-corruption is symptomatic of a deeper problem. Neither side of the political spectrum ever bucks their shared Atlanticist bent. In late 2014 Romania’s growing European diaspora propelled Klaus Iohannis—a nonentity in national politics, but heralded as an efficient German by the mythologizing middle classes. In 1990, 86 per cent of Romanians went to the polls; in 2008 and again in 2017, a mere 39 per cent. Once the badlands of neoliberal Europe, Romania has become its bustling frontier. "The Romanian banking system was taken over by Société Générale, Raiffeisen and the Erste Group. Its energy sector fell to Österreichische Mineralölverwaltung of Vienna and České Energetické Závody of Prague. Its steel manufacturing went to Mittal, its timber production to the Schweighofer Group, its national automobile, the Dacia, to Renault. Much of what isn’t yet

"In reality, there was never any golden age of liberalization under Erdoğan. The praise he attracted from Western elites as a ‘moderate’ and a ‘reformer’ was motivated above all by the  AKP ’s staunchly pro-American foreign policy and readiness to maintain good relations with Israel (the same criteria that earn the Saudi regime its ludicrous plaudits as a moderating force in the region). It also helped that  NATO ’s favourite Islamists had taken up the neoliberal agenda with gusto, privatizing state assets into the hands of  AKP  cronies—including Erdoğan’s close relatives." Erdogan's cesspit

The early days of imperial decline I doubt it. I have commented on this article. I think it does not cover some other crucial areas of the war and the players involved: the nature of the Russian regime, Iran and Israel as regional players, the defeat of Western imperialsim in Iraq and Afghanistan, the ideological reasons of that section of the Western and Arab left that supports Al-Assad either actively or passively...

" The most disgusting article I read in a long time [in the liberal Guardian]. All that is wrong with bourgeois liberal feminism which serves as nothing but being the tool of capitalism, militarism, and imperialism! Instead of saying "Women must smash NATO", it propagates that the same monstruous institution ' that is one of the most evil alliances to have blessed the universe and which is therefore one of the most direct causes for violence, conflict, and war - to help the poor poor woman. The only way NATO can help women is to disappear from the face of earth forever!  Down with patriarchy - down with militarism - and down with the idiots who try to sell us evil with a gender friendly face!" — Dilar Dirik

France: the choice

The Great Libya War Fraud Analysis by Hugh Roberts  Who said Gaddafi had to go?

The Great Libya War Fraud

Who Said Gaddafi Had to Go? An in-depth analysis of what happened then.  See also the comments and the reply.

Libya: Creative Destruction 1 Libya: Creative Destruction 2