Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Study shows human sacrifice was less likely in more equal societies

Reach-Me-Down Romantic

The Novel, Politics and Islam

Many a ruling class has sought to erase from historical memory the blood and squalor in which it was born. As Blaise Pascal admonishes with arresting candour in his  Pensées , ‘The truth about the [original] usurpation must not be made apparent; it came about originally without reason and has become reasonable. We must see that it is regarded as authentic and eternal, and its origins must be hidden if we do not want it soon to end.’   Kant, too, was wary of speculation on the origins of political power, which he thought a menace to the state.   It is not just that these are bloody and arbitrary; it is also the sheer scandal of an origin as such, for what was born can also die. It is certain, Hume writes in his  Treatise of Human Nature , that at the origin of every nation we will find rebellion and usurpation; it is time alone which ‘reconciles men to an authority, and makes it seem just and reasonable’.   Political legitimacy, in short, is founded on fading me...

Thirteen years of near-unbroken hostilities in Iraq have been desperately unkind to the environment. Heavily agricultural Nineveh and Kirkuk governorates, on the fringes of Iraq’s “Sunni Triangle,” were caught up in the chaos that followed the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. As far back as the 1980s, when Saddam Hussein press-ganged agricultural laborers into military service to fight Iran, landholders have had no choice but to adapt to the vagaries of war. For farmers still reeling from past troubles, the latest iteration of the conflict has plunged them even deeper into misery — and possibly sounded the death knell for agriculture in large parts of the country. At least a million acres of prime arable land has been rendered unusable as the Islamic State lays waste to huge swaths of Iraqi territory.   Systematic looting has robbed farms of much of the equipment necessary to renew operations. In an unprecedented development, some Iraqis have seen their land purposefully destro...

More stupidity from Jacobin

"All of this goes a little way to explaining why Britain has, for  some time now , been considered the  global capital  for criminal money laundering among those in the know. Perhaps, with the release of the Panama Papers, the last sheen of respectability will finally be stripped away." The “Panama Papers” show that the sun never sets on the United Kingdom’s tax havens. [Republished without foreignpolicy permission] There is a temptation, when looking at the astonishing “Panama Papers,” to start by searching for politicians from your own country who are implicated. If you are British and approach the documents in this way, you’ll find slim pickings in the  information released so far . Among the many thousands of names listed in the leak as possibly implicated in dodgy tax deals, there can’t be any appearance less surprising than that of Baroness Pamela Sharples, the widow of the former governor of Bermuda. That is, until you get to Lord Michael Ashcrof...

How did we end up here? "In  No Name in the Street , James Baldwin describes how, not long after he settled in France in 1948, he ‘had watched the police, one sunny afternoon, beat an old, one-armed Arab peanut vendor senseless in the streets, and I had watched the unconcerned faces of the French on the café terraces, and the congested faces of the Arabs.’ With a ‘generous smile’, Baldwin’s friends reassured him that he was different from the Arabs: ‘Le noir américain est très évolué, voyons!’ He found the response perplexing, given what he knew of French views about the United States, so he asked a ‘very cunning question’: If so crude a nation as the United States could produce so gloriously civilised a creature as myself, how was it that the French, armed with centuries of civilised grace, had been unable to civilise the Arab? The response was breathtakingly simple: ‘The Arabs did not wish to be civilised.’ They, the Arabs, had their own traditions, and ‘the Arab was a...

Britons learn everything is a massive con and then go back to work

Land Grabbing: Journeys in the New Colonialism

Anwar Shaikh’s " Capitalism – competition, conflict, crises "

"India’s entry into the new millennium has been marked by a series of dramatic ruptures with its post-independence settlement. The most insulated large economy of the capitalist developing world, with the most autonomous bourgeois bloc, has adopted a neoliberal form of integration into the world market. A right-wing, Hindu nationalist and authoritarian force, the Bharatiya Janata (Indian People’s) Party, has taken power, replacing the Congress Party as the centre of the political system. India has exploded an atomic bomb. Of the four Nehruvian principles that had officially guided India’s modernizing project since 1947—socialism, secularism, democracy and non-alignment—the first and last have been abandoned; the second has been redefined to accommodate Hindu nationalism, while the third, whose preservation was  the  great success story of an otherwise mottled record, is threatened as never before." —  Achin Vanaik in 2001

A headline on foreignpolicy.com: " TAXPAYERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!:  The Panama Papers confirm that the world’s elite cheat, lie, and steal. Will the masses finally do something about it?" Yes, there will be some rattles in the canteen and some whispers behind the desks then apart from a couple of exceptions, "the taxpayers" will carry on with their lives. One shouldn't underestimate how much capitalism, and its latest form, neoliberalism, has entrenched itself in people lives and minds. One shouldn't understimate the conservatism in people and the fear of taking responsibility. One shouldn't underestimate a bigger turn to the right. It is going to need events/incidents of seismic proportions to make people look for a genuine change. A discussion between Pierre Bourdieu and Günter Grass: Bourdieu: But there is a connexion between this sense of having lost the traditions of the Enlightenment and the global triumph of the neoliberal vision. I see neo...

From Panama, via London, with Love A system rotten to the core Panama Papers scandal grows for HSBC over Syria links With the City of London at its core, Britain's network of havens from tax, regulation and other pesky laws stretches first to the Crown Dependencies – Mann, Guernsey and Jersey – and then into the British Overseas Territories: the Virgin Islands, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands. From there, this web extends to places like Hong Kong: not under British rule since 1997, but, according to Nicholas Shaxton, still  feeding  “billions in business to the City”. Looking at the documents leaked from Mossack Fonseca one thing is clear: Britain's network is once again at the core. More than half of the companies listed in the documents are registered in the UK or its Overseas Territories, and Hong Kong plays a huge role. Panama Papers: 'an old tradition of English piracy

Once again on the “clash of barbarisms” By Pierre Rousset and Francois Sabado (written after 13 November terrorist attack in Paris) There is a Western imperialist responsibility, as there was after the 1914-18 war (with the Treaty of Versailles) in the rise of Nazism in Germany. The antifascists of the time did not fail to recall it systematically. However, once it took off, the Nazi Party was denounced and combated as such. Daesh has taken off... We must continue to explain the context, but the Islamic State must be seen for  what it is , not as a mere shadow of the West. Contemporary imperialism, neo-liberal policies, capitalist globalization, enterprises of colonization, endless wars, are tearing the social fabric of a growing number of countries, releasing all sorts of barbarism. But religious fundamentalisms too are formidable agents of the disintegration of whole societies. There is not in fact a “major barbarism” (the West) that we should be fighting today and a...

Generation Anthropocene: How humans have altered the planet for ever

Israel is reborn into a monster — and no one is going to stop it "...the decline... is changing the nation and its values" (?) What were this nation's values before this killing? Were they less barbaric? Were there less-endorsed-killings by the apathetic majority whether within or outside Israel?

The five most important charts from the   Panama Papers leaks:   Britain operates as the world's biggest  launderer of hidden incomes.

"Panama Papers" are the tip of the ice-berg. One can just imagine the whole size of the ice-berg itself.  However, let's not be distracted. Let's be tolerant. This is part of our way of life that many oppose. Our immedite enemy is that immigrant next door, that Muslim refugee at the gate, that unemployed on benefits, that greedy British teacher or junior doctor on strike, that French worker on the street. We have tolerated the banks plunder, the wars and occupations, the actions of our allies. Let's focus on Putin, but tolerate the Russian oligarchs in our midst. Let's comdemn the Turkish authoritarian measures or the Chinese dictatoship for the public consumption or the Saudi theocracy, but do business with all of them. It is the best of all possible worlds. We are still a "democracy" and we are "civilised". After all, look at how others are killing each other or treating women. Their conditions are certainly unrelated to how the ci...

" Islamic fundamentalism is a temporary, transitory movement, but it can last another 30 or 50 years -- I don’t know how long. Where fundamentalism isn’t in power it will continue to be an ideal, as long as the basic frustration and discontent persist that lead people to take extreme positions. You need long experience with clericalism to finally get fed up with it -- look how much time it took in Europe! Islamic fundamentalists will continue to dominate the period for a long time to come." – Maxime Rodinson on Islamic "Fundamentalism"  (in an interview in 1986)