Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Austria's New Right "A year ago — well before most of the current refugees arrived in Austria — polls in Upper Austria estimated the FPÖ’s  support  at around 30 percent. Earlier this year, before the refugee situation dominated headlines, elections in the southern province of Styria saw the FPÖ skyrocket from 10.7 to 28.8 percent, finishing just 2.5 percent behind the Social Democrats. And perhaps most importantly, at the federal level the FPÖ has led comfortably in every poll since April; the most recent surveys put them at 33 percent — a “comfortable ten point lead” over both the SPÖ and the conservative People’s Party (ÖVP). The idea that the FPÖ is merely profiting from anxiety about migration therefore conveniently overlooks the far right’s strength before the refugee crisis."

In LRB Letters Crisis in Brazil Putin in Syria Iraqi Healthcare

Morbid Symptoms Relapse in the Arab Uprising

If only the Russian regime follows the way the West do things...

Meet the Greek writers revolutionising poetry in the age of austerity

The Politics of Utopia — Fredric Jameson

Brazil’s Democracy to Suffer Grievous Blow Today as Unelectable, Corrupt Neoliberal is Installed

Via Michael Roberts' blog America's infrastructure is literally falling apart,according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/a/#p/home The American Society of Civil Engineers yesterday projected a $1.44tn investment funding gap between 2016 and 2025, warning of a mounting drag on business activity, exports and incomes. Without radical surgery, the decay in tunnels, railways and waterways will cost the US economy nearly $4tn in lost gross domestic product by 2025 as costs rise and productivity is impeded, according to estimates from the ASCE, dragging on a recovery in output that is the shallowest since the end of the second world war. Inadequate infrastructure is far from unique to the US. Public investment has been trending lower as a share of GDP in economies including Japan, Germany and France in recent decades.  The debate is being inflamed by a number of scandals involving decaying infrastructure, at a time when...

A response to Norman Finkelstein’s interview

" Being anti-Zionist “more than is necessary” means failing to stress, alongside these legitimate views, that the struggle against Zionism is not intended to destroy Israel, but rather, among other things, to save it from itself." Sand has made good points, but blundered it when qualified a criminal, colonialist, imperialist, racist, and apartheid state as a "democracy."

The Day We Discovered Our Parents Were Russian Spies

"Asef Bayat (AB):  If we look carefully to all of these experiences, all of the protests, including those in Libya, Syria, and Yemen, they were at first remarkably peaceful and civil. In both Syria and Libya, the regimes’ reaction was brutal and extraordinary. The protests suffered a lot of casualties, but they were still non-violent until the foreign forces got involved: NATO and Qatar in Libya and a host of countries ranging from Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the Unites States to Iran, Hezbullah, al-Qaeda and then Russia. Their involvement militarized the bulk of the uprisings, turning these countries into a theatrical stage for settling geopolitical accounts. It is remarkable that despite the brutality and violence by the regime and the armed opposition, the ordinary Syrians have shown that they still wish to protest peacefully when opportunities arise as we have seen in recent episodes." Most of the interview is not about the Arab uprising.

The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

Hamas, Jihad and Popular Legitimacy: Reinterpreting resistance in Palestine

"The prospect of such controversial measures being passed so urgently unleashed a wave of civil unrest with a 48-hour general strike by private and public sector unions bringing Greece to a standstill. Unionists said the measures were a “barbaric” eradication of hard-won rights and would be “the last nail in the coffin” for workers whose salaries have already been savaged by relentless rounds of gruelling austerity."

The Mythology Of Trump’s ‘Working Class’ Support

"There is no  document of civilization  which is not at the same time a  document of barbarism." — Walter Benjamin Colonial ruins are a fitting epitaph for the British empire

Bahrain's Uprising: Resistance and Repression in the Gulf "A very strong theme that emerges in the book is the internationalization of both repression and resistance. The book really stresses how the ambitions and foreign policy objectives of outside powers have shaped contentious politics in the country. Bahrain, trapped between the rivalry of Saudi Arabia and Iran, and geopolitically important for the US and UK, has only nominal sovereignty. Yet the role of non-state actors is explored and stressed too. Foreign companies and states, from Korea to France, benefit from selling weapons, spyware, and other products to Bahrain. Deterritorialized and despatialized, repression has become a big global business, and we are increasingly seeing the transnational repression of local protest, especially in the realm of surveillance technologies or the supply of arms and advice. Conversely, the same is true of oppositional movements and the human rights turn, where we see more and mor...

On this day in history The May Fourth Movement was the first mass movement in modern Chinese history. It began with about 5,000 university students in Beijing protesting the Versailles Conference's decision to transfer former German concessions in China to Japan. Demonstrations and strikes spread, and a nationwide boycott of Japanese goods followed. The movement began a patriotic outburst of new urban intellectuals against foreign imperialists and warlords and is often cited as the seminal event that led to what?

texts " Einstein publicly stated reservations about the proposal to partition the  British Mandate of Palestine  into independent Arab and Jewish countries. In a 1938 speech, "Our Debt to Zionism", he said: "I should much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state. My awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish state with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power, no matter how modest. I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain—especially from the development of a narrow nationalism within our own ranks, against which we have already had to fight strongly, even without a Jewish state. ... If external necessity should after all compel us to assume this burden, let us bear it with tact and patience.".  His attitudes were nuanced: In his testimony before the  Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry  in January 1946 he stated that he wa...