Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Bernie Sanders is "a critic" of US imperialism. Elizabeth Warren is not.

"Get Brexit done" has won! Related: The UK is more regionally divided than any comparable advanced economy. Our analysis finds stark regional differences in productivity, income, unemployment, health and politics. We are not the only country to have regional divides, but our regional inequalities in productivity, income and health are far worse than in any comparable country.  

Britain as Conservative and imperialist country, and a pioneer of an aggressive form of capitalism. Even Le Monde Diplomatique doesn't include Britain's foreign policy of the contending parties! UK's austerity elections

The oppressive state is a macho rapist

Making the AUC in the image of the US foreign policy

"The expropriators constitute a tiny percentage of the population, and they control what happens with that surplus value. It is this relationship of production, Wolff insists, that has thwarted the democratic promises of the American, French, and other bourgeois revolutions. And this system of minority rule over ownership of assets and people’s labour power is also the cause of the staggering inequality that afflicts the world now." Understanding socialism Related: The works of Eric Olin Wright

"As fledgling postcolonial states committed to the Palestinian issue, the two countries had a just cause and a sound aspiration to prosperous independence. But beyond brute patriarchal force – a force embodied in the stinginess and cruelty of Deeb’s maternal grandfather – they had no way of articulating either. Moral certainty made them impotent, the film implies, and so they ended up hurting their own citizens more than the enemy."

Imperialism and internationalism

"A key aspect of the current crisis—one which is regularly understated, if not  effaced  entirely—is the complicity of those of us residing in the global North in the collective punishment of over 81 million Iranians through and by means of one of the most comprehensive and unrelenting sanctions regimes in modern history." An interjection on the Western left's response to the recent protests in Iran

It was a bloodbath in Iran, but why should you care?

Class Struggle in France

"The grievances that drove 2011 uprisings never went away." The BBC way of reporting

Conservative women reflect a conservative country "since Momentum joined Labour, I find it a hostile party for moderates.” It has been the so-called moderates who took Britain to war, privatised almost everything, incressed inequality, imposed tuition fees, ignored the City's corruption, bonused the banks despite the plunder and blunder, selling arms to autocratic friends, created a housing crisis ...imposed austerity ...

"Whereas immigration controls are usually about stopping people entering a country illegally, the new imperialism requires African nations to prevent people leaving their territory if they might be coming to Europe. It’s the 21st century’s version of the Berlin Wall slung across the African continent." Europe's plan is working

Edward Luce, a leading Financial Times columnist and author of Retreat of Western Liberalism : ‘It was remarkably arrogant to believe the rest of the world would passively adopt our script’ after 1989, Luce writes. ‘Those who still believe in the inevitable triumph of the Western model might ask themselves whether it is faith, rather than facts, that fuels their worldview. We must cast a sceptical eye on what we have learned never to question.’ "The basis of Western democracy’s flourishing in the Atlantic world after 1945 was not ‘Western values’, but rising living standards and economic growth. Yet unstoppable economic processes—automation; the age of convergence with China and the rest—will put relentless pressure  on  wage-earners in the years ahead. Globally, Washington’s credentials as the world’s sheriff have been badly damaged by Bush’s pre-emptive wars and are now being trashed by Trump; a declining us is at risk of insecure over-reaction to the rise of China. But i...

There is is a God. It is called profit and competitive market that determine our life. At times it is called restructing and capital destruction capitalism needs for a "brighter future." Related: "Social progress"  means the more we develop technological means and the more we produce, the harder our life gets.

"Toby Dodge, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics and a longtime researcher on Iraq, said the post-2003 system which embedded corruption in the Iraqi state, as well as sectarianism and coercion, was starting to break down – and violence was spiralling as a result. " Oh, but I thought, or I have been told by the media since the invasion of Iraq and the the war in Syria, that sectarianism is inherent and the main issue and that it goes back to post-Mohammed era. Now someone is blaming an imperialist occupation and (re)engineering of the Iraqi society. And a "revolution" is unfolding, i.e. class and social issues have become prevelant.

It looks a must-read book Liberalism at Large The World According to the Economist

عن جميع الذين تاجروا بالقضية الفلسطينية ماضيا والذين في خندق التطبيع والتواطئ حاضرا كم كنتَ وحدك

"We must revitalise the enlightenment and recommit to honouring its values of freedom, respect for knowledge and democracy." — Joseph Stiglitz Stiglitz, a renegade, has been attacking "neoliberalism" and intellectual orthodoxy. I wonder though which part of "the enlightenment he wants to revitalise." Is it the Steven Pinker's way of cheriching "the enlightenment"? "Recommiting to honouring the values of freedom." What were these "values of freedom" before the 40 years of "neoliberalism"? What were they in regard to what imperialism inflicted on what used to be called at that time "the third world" or the support of despotism, etc? If the solution is some sort of a new social democracy, what socio-economic form of capitalism could be the foundation?