Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

 A historical victory for coal miners

"Whoever until this day emerges victorious, marches in the triumphal procession in which today’s rulers tread over those who are sprawled underfoot. The spoils are, as was ever the case, carried along in the triumphal procession. They are known as the cultural heritage. In the historical materialist they have to reckon with a distanced observer. For what he surveys as the cultural heritage is part and parcel of a lineage [ Abkunft : descent] which he cannot contemplate without horror. It owes its existence not only to the toil of the great geniuses, who created it, but also to the nameless drudgery of its contemporaries. There has never been a document of culture, which is not simultaneously one of barbarism. And just as it is itself not free from barbarism, neither is it free from the process of transmission, in which it falls from one set of hands into another. The historical materialist thus moves as far away from this as measurably possible. He regards it as his task to brush...

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.

Sunday between noon and 1pm on 104.4 FM (London) Or resonancefm.com (worldwide) Groundhog Day in Afghanistan : "Operation Panther's Claw" in Afghanistan and the British Media. Amy Goodman from "Democracy Now" in conversation with the journalist and film-maker John Pilger on Honduras, Iran, Gaza, health care in the US and "Obama's war" in Afghanistan-Pakistan.