Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

(in 4 episodes) The Coup   Greece vs Financial Terrorism

My diary   (26 August - 12 September 2015) Unexpected Cuba After the Blockade

ما بين جورج طرابيشي وأدونيس

"The NGO-ization of politics threatens to turn resistance into a well-mannered, reasonable, salaried, 9-to-5 job. With a few perks thrown in. Real resistance has real consequences. And no salary." Related articles: " It was remarked that of the $150bn (£105bn) spent in aid globally,  still only 1%  directly reaches southern civil society organisations. I know from experience how frustrating southern NGOs find it when there’s always money to write a report or host a workshop; but never enough for more local staff. If poverty could be overcome from report writing, then we would have solved it long ago." — Deborah Doane, the Guardian, 13 March 2016 The Anti-Poverty Swindle The Power of a Dollar NGOs: In the service of imperialism

How French Secularism Became Fundamentalist A militant form of laïcité has taken hold in France, backed by everyone from intellectuals to government officials. Is this what the republic’s founders envisioned?

Wilhelm Reich: the man who invented free love

The Assad Files

Crisis in Brazil The trade unions, if somewhat more active under Dilma, were a shadow of their combative past. The poor remained passive beneficiaries of PT rule, which had never educated or organised them, let alone mobilised them as a collective force. Social movements – of the landless, or the homeless – had been kept at a distance. Intellectuals were marginalised. But not only had there been no political potentiation of energies from below. The style of the material benefactions of the regime created little solidarity. There was no redistribution of wealth or income: the infamously regressive tax structure bequeathed by Cardoso to Lula, penalising the poor to pamper the rich, was left untouched. Distribution there was, appreciably raising the living standards of the least well-off, but it was individualised in form. With the  Bolsa Família  taking the form of disbursements to mothers of school-age children, this could not have been otherwise. Increases in the minim...

"Sure enough Sartre did have something for us: a prepared text of about two typed pages that – I write entirely on the basis of a twenty-year-old memory of the moment – praised the courage of Anwar Sadat in the most banal platitudes imaginable. I cannot recall that many words were said about the Palestinians, or about territory, or about the tragic past. Certainly no reference was made to Israeli settler-colonialism, similar in many ways to French practice in Algeria. It was about as informative as a Reuters dispatch, obviously written by the egregious Victor to get Sartre, whom he seemed completely to command, off the hook. I was quite shattered to discover that this intellectual hero had succumbed in his later years to such a reactionary mentor, and that on the subject of Palestine the former warrior on behalf of the oppressed had nothing to offer beyond the most conventional, journalistic praise for an already well-celebrated  Egyptian  leader. For the rest of that day Sar...

How a US President and JP Morgan made Panama: and turned it into a tax haven The Roosevelt/JP Morgan connection in the setting-up of the new state was a direct one. The Americans’ paperwork was done by a Republican party lawyer close to the administration, William Cromwell, who acted as legal counsel for JP Morgan. JP Morgan led the American banks in gradually turning Panama into a financial centre – and a haven for tax evasion and money laundering – as well as a passage for shipping, with which these practices were at first entwined when Panama began to register foreign ships to carry fuel for the Standard Oil company in order for the corporation to avoid US tax liabilities.

Some interesting arguments, but I think the take on Turkey is poor and superficial as it ignores Turkey's neo-liberal project, a state as a NATO member, its ties with Isreal, its role in the ongoing war in Syria and the geopolitical game has been playing to assert itself as a regional power, its record of repression of journalists and trade unions and, of course, its ongoing war on the Kurds.  "It   has to be remembered that liberalism has historically been compatible with racism, imperialism and colonialism. Liberalism without a commitment to a popular agency is not necessarily an emancipatory force." — Salman Sayyid Junaid Ahmad (JA): Dr. Sayyid, your earlier work, in particular  A Fundamental   Fear , was a scathing critique of existing accounts the rise of Islamism as well as what it signifies. It was a bold and innovative engagement with “critical theory” and the question of Islam and Islamism. But in some ways, your latest book is even more provoc...

Financial Assests Transferred to Offshore Tax Havens.

Britain lecturing the world on morality? That’s rich

The World's Most Powerful Corporation " Imagine a company with the influence of Google or Amazon, granted a state-sanctioned monopoly and the right to levy taxes abroad – and with MI6 and the army at its disposal." See also The capitalist network that runs the world

Apples and Pears: the Economist on Profits

Tehran: Paradox City (1) Tehran: Paradox City (2)

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...