Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Russia When autarky becomes the only solution

The Real Views and Aims of the Putin-gate "Skeptics"

A journey into Russia's Muslim heartlands

There were no red banners in Navalny’s largely teenage and twenty-something audience. But if Russia has any revolutionary energy left, it isn’t to be found among Stepakhno’s ‘left patriotic youth’, but here, among Navalny’s supporters. Not that 1917 itself is much of a marker these days: young people are taught next to nothing about the October Revolution, said Violetta Grudina, who heads Navalny’s small but active Murmansk cell. ‘The very word “revolution” has been branded extremist. Better not to talk about it – what if people find out that it’s possible?’   [A Russian] Diary

Iran " Putin, Assad, Hezbollah and all their cheerleaders in the alt-right and Stalinist left are already trying to smear the protests as pro-imperialist. The revolt shows, once again, that Stalinism is not a dead issue in the progressive movement, and that its remaining advocates want only an authoritarian “anti-imperialist” regime to support." Good! I completely agree with that. However, Paul Mason has drawn a fair picture until he messed it up with this: "But their rhetorical support does not delegitimise the mass upsurge, nor does it mean the EU and Western democratic countries should stand back and ignore the repression." Is he appealling to the EU and Western imperialist states to do something? I don't understand these type of leftist journalists who instead of appealing to progressives, trade unions, ordinary people, they talk to the criminal states which have been pursuing criminal, hypocritical policies for their own geopolitical interests. Th

Alexey Navalny: Russia's Trump

The Red Army was "the main engine of Nazism’s destruction,"  writes British historian and journalist Max Hastings in "Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945." The Soviet Union paid the harshest price: though the numbers are not exact, an estimated 26 million Soviet citizens died during World War II, including as many as 11 million soldiers. At the same time, the Germans  suffered three-quarters of their wartime losses  fighting the Red Army. "It was the Western Allies’ extreme good fortune that the Russians, and not themselves, paid almost the entire ‘butcher’s bill’ for [defeating Nazi Germany], accepting 95 per cent of the military casualties of the three major powers of the Grand Alliance," writes Hastings. Don't forget how the Soviet Union saved the world from Hitler (the Washington Post) Yes, that happened despite Stalin's crimes and blunders.

Russia falls into old habits

" The fundamental problem with the EU these days is that it needs a federal state structure simply in order to exert its basic functions. The EU 28 is a dysfunctional mess in virtually everything it does. The eurozone is stuck in a perma-crisis. The EU is pathetically weak towards Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, and largely absent in Syria. Now we know that it cannot even do trade deals. My overall conclusion is that the next phase of European integration — which will happen eventually — will have to be preceded by a period of disintegration. Brexit was only the start." — Wolfgang Münchau, the Financial Times After creating such a crisis and plunder, that is probably how neo-liberal EU will restructure itself, but with more plunder  (privatisation and robbery), more attack on the living standard of the workers, more nationalism and xenophobia at home and abroad. I think Stratfor.com analysis regarding the future of the EU is more sound than the above o