Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

What Sinclair Lewis “is trying to do here is to trace the way these ideologies develop and how the negligence of liberal or tolerant ‘ordinary’ people allows monsters to emerge. What he’s also keen to do is to illustrate just how seemingly civilised, decent people can transform into brutal oppressors when they are given permission to behave in that way. “But this is not an issue that is exclusive to Trump’s rise in the USA. What Lewis has to tell us might well apply equally to the rise of the populist Right in Poland, Hungary, Holland, Italy and France. It should also have echoes for us here in the UK as we try and understand the way in which a populist Right is being allowed to set the political agenda – Brexit and all.”

“In the beginning, everyone we met was really helpful – and then the reality set in. I am grateful to them for saving our lives, but in this bargain, I’ve lost my dignity, my home and I’m very depressed,” says Rias. Reflecting on the racism they’ve faced in their first year in Europe

“These people are not people we are used to… these people are Europeans.”  – Kiril Petkov, Bulgarian Prime Minister,  Associated Press , March 1, 2022

The racist character of Fortress Europe on display

“The first thing one must know is that it has nothing to do with Corona and everything to do with saving the Italian government from Signor Salvini.   The second thing is that it has nothing to do with European solidarity either.” Winners All

“ At an almost planetary scale, and for some years now – certainly ever since what was called ‘the Arab Spring’ – we are in a world awash with struggles, or, more precisely, with mass mobilisations and assemblies. I propose that the general conjuncture is marked, subjectively, by what I would term ‘movementism’, namely the widely shared conviction that significant popular assemblies will undoubtedly achieve a change in the situation. We see this from Hong Kong to Algiers, Iran to France, Egypt to California, Mali to Brazil, India to Poland, as well as in many other places and countries. One may revolt against the actions of the Chinese government in Hong Kong, against the power grab by military cliques in Algiers, against the stranglehold of the religious hierarchy in Iran, against personal despotism in Egypt, against the manoeuvres of nationalist and racial reaction in California, against the actions of the French Army in Mali, against neofascism in Brazil, against the persecution of ...

Polish women should to travel to Turkey, Tunisia, or Azerbaijan–countries with Muslim majority–to seek abortion.   Abortion: Ban on almost all terminations

Thirty years since the collapse of the Soviet Block "Capitalism’s triumph did not arise from a mass desire, but a choice made by the communist nomenklatura: to transform its privileges of function into privileges of ownership. Although the elites’ ‘grand conversion’ has been analysed  there are few studies on the social base of the old single party, which, though it became restive, did not demand privatisations." In the name of the communist ideal

Via Michael Roberts Poland, the largest Eastern European country, goes to the polls today. The socially conservative Law and Justice party government is expected to increase its vote share in the election. The centre-right Civic Platform — which ruled Poland from 2007 to 2015 with EU President Donald Tusk remains unpopular because of its previous austerity measures in line with EU policy. In contrast, Law and Justice has raised welfare  benefits. The flagship policy was a child benefit scheme, dubbed 500+, that pledged a monthly payment of 500 zlotys for every second and subsequent child, a sum that could provide larger families with the equivalent of another salary. And now the government is offering a sharply higher minimum wage which would increase in steps from 2,250 zlotys (€511) today to 4,000 zlotys by the end of 2023 — a 78 per cent jump. This is the basis of support for Law and Justice probably despite its promotion of Catholic-infused conservative values; and...

A new photo album

Humans facing violence at home and violence abroad Just replace each of the photographs by stories of animals and they would see showers of millions of likes and messages of solidarity and tears. A Polish taxi-driver told me today that the priority is to Christian and skilled Ukrainians coming to Poland, not to Syrians, for example. I refrained from telling him: You are right. What would the Polish gain from "Syrian infidels with backward culture and backward religion? Wasn't the Polish regime part of the imperialist 2003 invasion of Iraq? Who made the situation there worse? Why did we get such a wave of refugees in the past few years? And I hope the ordinary Polish have gained something from their government's adventure in joining that criminal invasion and destruction.  Today the Polish government is rewriting history, including criminalising anyone who says that some Polish were involved in the Nazi extermination of the Jews on Polish soil. I managed to tell hi...

"Salvini is attempting to mould an aggressive Catholicism around a hyper-masculinised personality cult. The crucifix and the rosary become emblems of far-right Crusader-style military erotica, to be wielded by real men against the limp humanitarianism of Pope Francis who has spoken out on behalf of refugees and, most famously, in 2013  lamented ‘ the globalisation of indifference’  at an open-air mass in  Lampedusa, held against the backdrop of the hulks of shipwrecked migrant boats." Wilhelm Reich's The Mass Psychology if Fascism comes to mind. White supremacy, racial patriarchy: two sides of the same coin

Poland He fought within Solidarność for a peaceful transformation of the system, where strong workers’ organizations and widespread civic participation would lead to a democratic socialism, based either on continued state ownership or extensive social democratic-type economic intervention. (There were plenty of hothead activists in the movement, Modzelewski later recalled, “but nobody called for the privatization of the economy, or reprivatization of property confiscated by the state in 1945. Nobody.”) "I Didn't Sit Eight and a Half Years in Jail to Build Capitalism"

"Can it be realistic to assume that there will be no major slump in the major capitalist economies over the next ten to 15 years? A slump as the UK economy experienced in 2008-9 would deliver much more long-lasting damage to national income than even a ‘bad Brexit’ deal.  I calculate that the UK economy, like all the other major economies in the Long Depression that has taken place in the last ten years, has experienced a permanent relative loss in GDP – in the UK’s case of over 25%.  In other words, the UK economy has had average growth some one-quarter slower since 2008 than it did before.  Even if it continued to grow at around 2% over the next ten years with no impact from Brexit, that relative loss from the Great Recession would reach 40% by 2030.  That would be four times as much as the worst outcome from Brexit." Brexit: 100 days and after

It was a different Poland. Yes, it was authoritarian, but it has a sense of international brotherhood. It was not a Poland that joined the imeprialists in destroying Iraq. "The festival was the catalyst for a decades-long series of Polish press photographs showing people of African descent (PAD) visiting and living in Poland. Bartosz Nowicki, a Polish photographer and curator who currently lives in Wales, has spent the past few years researching these archive photos from the period 1955-1989. He recently curated an exhibition,  Afro PRL , which highlighted the long-standing connections between white Poles and PAD, a memory that is often forgotten in contemporary Poland." "Afro-Poland"

Abortion Bahrain vs. Ireland Bahrain vs. Poland Bahrain and Tunisia vs. Spain Turkey // Sweden, Greece, Italy Turkey vs. Argentina Egypt // Ireland

"We formed an alliance with Stalin right at the end of the most murderous years of Stalinism, and then allied with a West German state a few years after the Holocaust. It was perhaps not surprising that in this intellectual environment a certain compromise position about the evils of Hitler and Stalin—that both, in effect, were worse—emerged and became the conventional wisdom." — Thimothy Snyder, a Professor of History at Yale, US. An interesting perspective. Stalin vs. Hitler: who was worse? Who killed more: Hitler, Stalin, or Mao?

These regimes are human trash

In the-called  "communist" countries, Women Had Better Sex ( The New York Times )

This is very good! From Somerdale to Skarbimierz