Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“ The political and moral deformations and intellectual helplessness of Germany today are more dangerous than at any other time since 1945…  The country that laid waste the moral structure of western society looks feeble again before the economic crises and social breakdowns of capitalism that first produced fascism. Revealingly, the binary of the enlightened west and unenlightened east – once used to authorise the Nazi quest for  Lebensraum  in the east and then adapted to serve cold war policy agendas – is the currency today of far-right nationalists across Israel, Europe and America…  And there was much about western democracies – especially their foundations in white supremacy, and cultures of racism and antisemitism – that allowed Hitler to believe that they would welcome his extermination of Jews.” Related The new German chauvinism  ( an essay in two parts) Germany's reckoning with its past is no longer a model

“He knew there was something about the way Switzerland operated that made it uniquely useful to the forces of capitalism: not as a lead actor, but as an enabler working from behind the scenes.  “Some years later, Ziegler would use the term ‘secondary imperialism’ to define his country’s modus operandi. “Ziegler’s thesis, which he stands by to this day, is that Switzerland’s role in the world is that of accomplice – handmaiden, of sorts – to capitalism. “The transgressors included the banks that welcomed suitcases of cash from dictatorships in Portugal and the Dominican Republic; the real estate agencies that helped Gulf sheikhs and Guatemalan colonels buy lakeside apartments in which to hide; and subsidiaries of the American firms Dow Chemical and Honeywell, which oversaw the international sales of napalm and landmines. “To this day, is that Switzerland’s role in the world is that of accomplice – handmaiden, of sorts – to capitalism .”

Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin,  2024 Released less than two months after Hamas’s attack and the beginning of the Israeli genocidal war on Gaza. ‘Assassasin’ in the title? Although he was involved in a plot, in the movie Bonhoeffer did not kill anybody.  The movie is available on onionplay.asia

“Four years before [Alexis] de Tocqueville’s  Ancien Regime , Karl Marx famously wrote how human beings make their own history, but they don’t make it as they please. They make it ‘under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past’. In this way, both de Tocqueville and Marx emphasize how human actors emerge from the circumstances around them, and this history conditions and weighs upon them as they seek to remake the world of the present.  What kind of ‘dead weight’ did the Nazi Holocaust cast on Zionism, Jews, and the State of Israel?” Nazis! Liquidating the ghetto of Gaza Related Huwara, February 2023 “I want to restore security for the residents of the State of Israel,” fellow Otzma Yehudit MK  Zvika Fogel said  the morning after the rampage . “How do we do that? We stop using the word ‘proportionality.’ We stop with our objection to collective punishment [just] because it doesn’t fly with all sorts of courts. We take the gloves of...

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

On BBC Radio 4

A VPN is required Mistress of War

  Is it possible to stop people from becoming fascists?

"At the end of the genocide of the Tutsi, the militia was 30,000 strong. The Interahamwe broke the world’s most atrocious records for the speed of the killing of human beings, estimated at five times that of the Nazis." The Violence of Denial—Rwanda and the Lived Memory of Genocide

A new photo album

The Infiltrator

When social industry bans the people we hate

London "It is easy to see why. When the far right starts attacking books, alarm bells ring for anyone who wants to live in a democratic society. In May 1933 the German student union, a Nazi organisation, initiated the mass public burning of books in an attempt to “purify” society and rid it of “un-German” influences. Tens of thousands of volumes were hauled from libraries and archives and burned in public squares. Among the first to be burned were books by socialists and communists such as Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Friedrich Engels and Bertolt Brecht, and novelists including  John Dos Passos , Jack London, Maxim Gorky, Franz Kafka and Upton Sinclair. Books by all of these authors can be found on the shelves of Bookmarks today." When the far-right targets books

Anti-semitism This is probably the first time I remove a post from the blog. Enough is enough and The Labour Party, Israel, and anti-semitism So not to confuse a crude depiction with serious opposition to the crimes of the Israeli state as a settler, colonial, apartheid and imperialist state. And not to use the anti-semitism exploited by the Western imperialist state to silence any oppsition to the Israeli state or deflect attention from an alternative,  small as it is, to the status quo, exploitation, austerity, plunder, wars, oligarchy, corruption, stduents debt, neoliberalism, obscene inequality, cuts in social services, xenophobia, hypocrisy, double standard, attacks on pensions, teaming with autocrats for financial and geopolitical interests, etc.

Rewriting of history, erasing memory Jewish students killed in the Holocaust to be honoured — unless they fought the Nazis

"It’s Brechtian, yes, but more than that, it opens up narratives into multiplicity and uncertainty." Winter Solstice

Sara Ginaite Lithuanian Jewish Partisan

Postwar West German ministry ‘burdened’ by ex-Nazis, study says " Up to 76 per cent of officials in the post-1945 West German justice ministry were former Nazis, according to an official history published on Monday that highlights how party members protected each other long after the second world war." 

Sometimes you find surprises in the gutter press " But not every part of the resistance was grateful. De Gaulle’s supporters in Paris  feared either a communist seizure of power or a mirror of the bloodbath that was befalling the August 1944 Warsaw Uprising. Through the Swedish consul they negotiated a truce with the German military governor on 20 August, but this was not observed by the insurgents who threw up barricades in a revolutionary reflex and continued guerrilla warfare, seizing weapons from the panicking Germans." The forgotten heroes of Paris, 1945