Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

In social life there are  degrees   of power and degrees of falsity.   The more the masses of people adhere to truth, the less power-mongering there will be;  the more imbued with irrational illusions the masses of people are, the more widespread and brutal individual power-mongering will be. —Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism From the same source: Open avowal of dictatorship is much less dangerous than sham democracy. The first one can fight; sham democracy is insidious. It was one of the greatest errors in evaluating dictatorship to say that the dictator forces himself on society against its own will. In reality, every dictator in history was nothing but the accentuation of already existing state ideas which he had only to exaggerate in order to gain power.

The BBC probably never mentioned John Pilger before until he died. Using google, one cannot find his name on the BBC.  I did not always agree with Pilger’s way of reporting, but he was one of those who opened my mind to how I should relate to and analyse the corporate media and how crimes and complicities are hidden or ignored. That was the time Chomsky's and Herman’s Manufacturing Consent – The Political Economy of the Mass Media fell in my hands. Here is something the British Broadcasting Corporation and Jessica Murray of the Guardian have deliberately, in their usual selectivity, ignored to mention: The War on Democracy   The War On Democracy (English subtitles) from John Pilger on Vimeo .

The ideologization of war

Nothing is more anarchical than power. Power does whatever it wants. And what power wants is completely arbitrary, or imposed by economic needs that escape common logic. –Pier Paolo Pasolini

 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson: The people who get to impose their metaphors on the culture get to define what we consider to be true.

  “[H]istory is made in such a way that the final result always arises from conflicts between many individual wills, of which each in turn has been made what it is by a host of particular conditions of life. Thus there are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant — the historical event. This may again itself be viewed as the product of a power which works as a whole  unconsciously  and without volition. For what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed. Thus history has proceeded hitherto in the manner of a natural process and is essentially subject to the same laws of motion. But from the fact that the wills of individuals — each of whom desires what he is impelled to by his physical constitution and external, in the last resort economic, circumstances (either his own personal circumstances or those of society in general) — do not attain w...

“What relevance does it have for you or me that a long-dead French thinker believed neoliberalism offered a possible escape hatch from the particular problems of normative power? “Do Not Ask me Who I am”

 

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’

Hinting to economic and political domination/oppression without linking class to race, blurs and even hides what you call “structural” in any society.  Remember how the conflicts in Iraq and Syria have been mainly treated as sectarianism . That is what the following analysis does. There are black capitalists and black people who believe in the morals and ideas of the bourgeoisie. There are black imperialists and the recent example in the US is the most obvious. Then there is global power relations that perpetuates racism and class oppression. A black person in an A country could be oppressed racially and economically by the national ruling class and the country itself is dominated by Western imperialism, which perpetuates those oppressive class and racial relations globally. Any attempt to break out of such domination (see the recent experience of Latin America and Egypt, for example) is met by fierce opposition, sabotage or cooption by Western imperialism. Power and Exclusion ...

Some of this reminds me of how five or six years ago in a class of seven students in a UK elite university three of them (two Germans and one British) were in favour of a "benevolent dictator" (in the Arab context). The bloody horrors of Pinochet showed how capitalism will react when it's threatened

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..." ...

What kind of political discourse, with what social and po­ litical effects, is contemporary tolerance talk in the United States? What readings of the discourses of liberalism, colonialism, and impe­rialism circulating through Western democracies can analytical scru­ tiny of this talk provide? The following chapters aim to track the so­ cial and political work of tolerance discourse by comprehending how this discourse constructs and positions liberal and nonliberal subjects, cultures, and regimes; how it figures conflict, stratification, and dif­ ference; how it operates normatively; and how its normativity is ren­dered oblique almost to the point of invisibility. Part of the project of this book, then, is to analyze tolerance, espe­ cially in its recently resurgent form, as a strand of depoliticization in liberal democracies. Depoliticization involves construing inequality, subordination, marginalization, and social conflict, which all require political analysis and...

Sex Power Violence #MeToo A verso free ebook

An interesting story with a rubbish "solution" Bibi's Son

Foucault's  History of Sexuality : A Marxist Engagement

Reassessing Foucault: Modern Sexuality and the Transition to Capitalism

The power thinker

“Toward the end of 1951, Secretary of State Dean Acheson formed a special committee on the Arab world under the chairmanship of Kermit Roosevelt, from the newly established CIA. The committee suggested the need for “an Arab leader who would have more power in his hands than any other Arab leader ever had before, ‘power to make an unpopular decision’ … one who deeply desires to have power, and who desires to have it primarily for the mere sake of power.” This recommendation was made more explicit in a British Foreign Office minute on December 3, 1951, which described the joint American-British view as follows: “the only sort of Government with which we can hope to get an accommodation is a frankly authoritarian government … both ruthless and efficient … We need another Mustafa Kemal [the Turkish officer who led a modernizing coup in 1921, and assumed the title Atatürk, the father of the Turks], to secularize and Westernize his country … Even though Egyptians are not Turks, and men like...

“The [Charlie Hebdo] cartoon simply fails as satire, because it is indistinguishable from straightforward racist graffiti.”  Charlie Hebdo , The Poverty of Satire " Whatever the variety of causes we could discuss, the fact is that the Muslim – from Mohammed to our own time – became  Charlie Hebdo ’s ‘bad object of desire’ . Mocking Muslims and making fun of their mannerisms became this declining ‘comedic’ magazine’s stock in trade, a bit like how a century ago  Bécassine  made fun of the poor (and at that time, Christian…) peasants who came from Brittany to wipe the arses of the children of the Parisian bourgeoisie."