Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“There is no alternative, I concluded. The delusion of democracy was a colonial concoction (a world capitalist ruse) that is now exposed for what it is and over and done with - we've hit a wall with pictures of Trump, Modi, Assad, Sisi, Ayatollah Khamenei, Putin, and the rest of them plastered all over it. This is the case unless, like Hannah Arendt, we make a crucial distinction between freedom from tyranny and liberty to choose a different political system. At this point in history, I have therefore concluded, we are far more invested in freedom from tyranny than harbouring any conviction or trust in liberty to choose a legitimate alternative state. I am now convinced we are far better off understanding what has tormented us and despising it than hoping to achieve what we wish and has historically escaped us.”

Michael Mann, 1999 The twentieth century’s death-toll through genocide is somewhere over sixty million and still rising. Yet most scholars and laypersons alike have preferred to focus on more salubrious topics. If they think about genocide at all, they view it as an unfortunate interruption of the real structural tendencies of the twentieth century—economic, social and political progress. Murderous ethnic and political cleansing is seen as a regression to the primitive—essentially antimodern—and is committed by backward or marginal groups manipulated by clever and dangerous politicians. Blame the politicians, the sadists, the terrible Serbs (or Croats) or the primitive Hutus (or Tutsis)—for their actions have little to do with us. An alternative view—often derived from a religious perspective—sees the capacity for evil as a universal attribute of human beings, whether ‘civilized’ or not. This is true, yet capacity for evil only becomes actualized in certain circumstances, and, in the c...

[The question about Syria is about looking for a pure revolution á la ‘Marxist-Leninist’ or the ‘liberal-democratic’ criteria or it is not a revolution. Nor is it just about the reactionary forces that have destroyed the revolutionary experiment and potentials and they have know claimed its ‘flag’. It is the character and content of the process and what the actors involved envisaged. The early content and character cannot be seen neither in the outlook of those who toppled the regime in December 2024 nor in the one of the regional and international actors that are trying to influence the current outcome and the future of Syria. ] “Syrian revolutionaries like those in Manbij did not speak the dominant academic Western language about social processes and revolutions—either because they could not or were unwilling to. As a result, many journalists and academics have effectively denied them any form of agency. Many Western descriptions present them as mindless fighters who are easily manip...

“There are those who believe that any local actor is but the puppet of some external actor. Such people can’t acknowledge any agency for local actors. That’s, of course, a very poor way of perceiving the situation. “We are against both American imperialism and Russian imperialism as well as Iran’s reactionary intervention abroad. And the result of foreign domination is always similar. Whether the puppet master is Russia or the United States, puppet regimes are puppet regimes. And the Assad regime had become one for a very long time, except that it was a puppet with two competing masters, giving it a little bit of space. All this has collapsed and is over now. “HTS does not have the same force that the Taliban had. It’s smaller, weaker than what the Taliban were. And it would be hard for them to impose themselves on the Kurds, just as it would be hard for them to really get rid of those Syrian opposition forces that are completely dominated by Turkey, which are in the north. Likewise, I...

Revealing the human side of the Syrian revolution/war

The democratic petty bourgeois, far from desiring to overturn the whole of society for the revolutionary proletarian, strives for a change in social conditions which will make the existing society as endurable and comfortable as possible for him. —Karl Marx  The bourgeois ... is tolerant. His love for people as they are stems from his hatred of what they might be. —Theodor Adorno

Arno Mayer (1926-2023)

“There are other times when I seek out the wisdom of those human beings who refused to turn their faces from forms of social terror and found strength to endure.” A good and stimulating interview . Contrary to the title though, the treatment of the relevance of Malcolm X’s ideas in the exchange between Yancy and Sawyer are marginal.  

“What Foucault and many intellectuals  at the time  were struggling against  was not only socialism abroad, but also a certain kind of socialism and its legacy in France. More fundamentally,  after 1968, it is the very notion and entire conceptual structure of revolution  that Foucault would reject.” “In May 1975, Michel Foucault took LSD in the desert in southern California. He described it as the most important event of his life, one which would lead him to completely rework his History of Sexuality. His focus now would not be on power relations but on the experiments of subjectivity and the care of the self” The Last Man Takes LSD Michel Foucault Related Foucault and neoliberalism:  “Do Not Ask me Who I am”

One has to wonder whether CLR James’s critical essay/talk has anything relevant to the uprisings since 2010-2011. The essay was originally published in 1982

An interview with the editor of the book Samer S. Shehata

“The pretense of “saving” Iraqi women was a dimension of the neocolonial narrative of democracy building leveraged by the US administration to invade and occupy Iraq. “Saving” implies that US imperial domination is superior and even necessary and inherently good for women. Iraqi women are perceived as an ahistorical homogenous object, portrayed as essentially voiceless victims. Even 20 years after the destructive and devastating invasion and occupation, the gendering of the democracy narrative on the Middle East remains. The focus on women’s political participation and visibility is a central dimension of the democracy narrative that has dominated the US discourse on Iraq: the idea that Iraq now runs free elections, has women in its parliament and therefore the country is a democracy. In reality, Iraqis have turned away from the polls—the 2021 elections had the  lowest voter turnout  in Iraq post-2003—and many have decided to take to the streets to voice their political vision...

The key to China’s  development since 1949 lies in the vast countryside, but the country’s rulers are still reluctant to discuss the darker side of the land reform.

The bourgeois world, blown up by gunpowder, will when the smoke settles and the ruins are cleared, arise again, with some modifications, as another sort of bourgeois world, because it is not yet internally exhausted and the new world is not ready to replace it. — Alexan­der Herzen, the father of Russian populism Marxism is a revolutionary world outlook which must always strive for new discoveries, which completely despises rigidity in once-valid theses, and whose living force is best preserved in the intellectual clash of self-criticism and the rough and tumble of history. —Rosa Luxemburg in Anti-Critique

A revolutionary movement without a revolutionary change

Nature and Revolution in Marcuse’s Philosophy of Praxis

A review of Sudan’s Unfinished Democracy Related Historical background To understand fully today’s popular protests, we need to look all the way back to the Sudan’s colonial past. Post-independence conflicts in Sudan were largely caused by ethnic divisions created by the British colonial administration between 1899 and 1956. “Divide and rule” policies pursued by the British continue to haunt contemporary Sudan, both north and south. During most of the colonial period (1899-1956), Sudan was ruled as two Sudans. The British separated the predominantly Muslim and Arabic-speaking north from the multi-religious, multi-ethnic, and multilingual south. Britian’s “divide-and-rule” policy separated southern Sudanese provinces from the rest of the country and slowed down their economic and social development. The British authorities claimed that the south was not ready to open up to the modern world. At the same time, the British heavily invested in the Arab north, modernizing and liberalizing p...

“We paid the price twice” for Bashir’s dictatorship, says Amjed Farid, the opposition activist. “We got rid of the tyrant who was supporting terror, through a popular revolution that we paid for with our blood. And now we are paying the price for this tyrant, even though we were his first victims.” “Is this justice?”

From Imamate to the present

I think this is the best part in Sadiq Jalal Al-Azm’s essay The Importance of Being Earnest About Salman Rushdie : The self-enclosed universes of Hijab and The Grand Balcony exist and function against the background of a revolution taking place in the outside world. In both instances, the revolution forms a threat to the very existence of the bordello. In The Balcony , the revolution fails after destroying the Queen, the Archbishop's palace, the law courts, and the army headquarters. As the Chief of Police becomes the master of the new counter-revolutionary order, Genet transports Madam Irma and her clients out of the "house of illusions" to become the Queen, the Archbishop etc. in support of the new regime of repression. In the Hijab episode the revolution succeeds after destroying the old centers and symbols of Jahilian power. As its chief, Mahound, becomes the master of the new revolutionary order, Rushdie transports him and his "queens" into the "house ...