Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

It was the very same Zelensky who   withdrew  U kraine's membership from the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People in 2020. As Israel was killing and bombing Palestinians in May 2021, Zelensky   depicted  it as the victim of the Palestinians and not as a predatory settler-colonial state which Ukrainian Jews helped establish. Ironically, that Zelensky thinks Israel’s neighbours "want to see us dead" may be no more than a psychological projection of what he and the Israelis want to see happen to Palestinians, not the other way around.  The Ukrainian Jewish role in the dispossession of Palestine

Neolights

17 أبريل 2022

 “What’s the point of having this superb military we’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”

The culture war

Is it because of ‘bad ideas’?

A supporter of Israeli oppression

War time law removing labour rights

" The plan seemed to be: Sack 800 staff with immediate effect by three-minute video message ; manhandle those who refuse leave their posts (using handcuffs if necessary); leave customers stranded in various ports because there's no one to crew ships; and replace all staff with cheap labour in a few weeks. What could possibly go wrong?" says Kate Hartley, author of "How to Communicate in a Crisis".   Related “The Office for Budget Responsibility painted a bleak picture of the UK's immediate economic prospects, saying that living standards are set to take the biggest hit since records began in the 1950s .”

No tears to shed over a woman who was part and parcel of an imperialist criminal state. “[Madeleine]  Albright was also champion of Nato expansion , overseeing the addition of Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia in 1999 - a move whose repercussions are being keenly felt today.” On May 12, 1996, Albright defended  UN sanctions against Iraq  on a  60 Minutes  segment  in which  Lesley Stahl  asked her, "We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?" and Albright replied, "We think the price is worth it." In the context of the 1998 Iraq campaign, Albright expressed another justification , saying, "But if we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us."  In 2014, a released diplomatic cable  reveale...

The increasingly transparent weaknesses and contradictions in the capitalist system may eventually convince even some of its more uncritical supporters that an alternative needs to be found. But the conviction that there is and can be no alternative is very deeply rooted, especialyl in Western culture. That conviction is supported not only by the more blatant expressions of capitalist ideology but also by some of our most cherished and unques­tioned beliefs about history – not just the history of capitalism but history in general. –Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism , 2002, p. 2

You can put Marx back into the nineteenth century, but you can’t keep him there. He wasted a ridiculous amount of his time feuding with rivals and putting out sectarian brush fires, and he did not even come close to completing the work he intended as his magnum opus, “Capital.” But, for better or for worse, it just is not the case that his thought is obsolete. He saw that modern free-market economies, left to their own devices, produce gross inequalities, and he transformed a mode of analysis that goes all the way back to Socrates—turning concepts that we think we understand and take for granted inside out—into a resource for grasping the social and economic conditions of our own lives. with his compatriots in the nineteenth century, and that certainly does not wear well today, after the experience of the regimes conceived in his name. It therefore sounds perverse to say that Marx’s philosophy was dedicated to human freedom. But it was. Marx was an Enlightenment thinker: he wanted a wo...

The life of a great Marxist

Beginning in 2014 and 2015 respectively,  US and Russian interventions would in time lead to some 75,000 air strikes against Iraq and Syria. However much the coalition’s actions against ISIS (Daesh) and Russia’s support for Assad differ in intent and context, both have been disastrous for people on the ground; the bombing campaigns alone have killed between 20,000 and 55,000 Syrian and Iraqi civilians. The alliance’s figure of 1,417 civilian deaths has been widely contested. In December 2021 a  New York Times  investigation based on a review of 1,300 Pentagon reports concluded that ‘the air war has been marked by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and often imprecise targeting, and the deaths of thousands of civilians, many of them children, a sharp contrast to the American government’s image of war waged by all-seeing drones and precision bombs. The coalition claims it values transparency and is willing ‘to work with anyone making allegations or providing new, credible i...

A good summary. “There is no contradiction between standing with the people of Ukraine and against Russia’s heinous invasion and being honest about the hypocrisy, war crimes, and militarism of the U.S. and NATO. We have an undeniable moral responsibility to prioritize holding our own government accountable for its crimes because they are being done in our names and with our tax dollars. That does not mean we should be silent in the face of the crimes of Russia or other nations, but we do bear a specific responsibility for the acts of war committed by our own nations.” On hypocrisy: “ How many of the people with Ukrainian flag avatars on their Twitter profiles have spent days or weeks pleading for the world to stand up for ordinary Yemenis living under the hell of American bombs and Saudi warplanes? The same question applies in the case of the Palestinians who live under an  apartheid state  imposed by Israel and backed up by a sustained campaign of annihilation  supported...

Between 1918 and 1998, US administrations restricted trade with sanctioned nations 115 times; 64 of these occasions were during the 1990s, and most of them were unilateral. By 1997, the equivalent of half the world’s population was living under some form of US sanction. Current debates within the EU over what to do about Russia have led to some rhetorical contortions. Commission president Ursula von der Leyen appeared to support the US position that ‘Nord Stream 2 could not be excluded a priori from the list of [preventive] sanctions’, adding, ‘We want to build the world of tomorrow as democracies with like-minded partners.’ But among the energy partners that might replace Russia, Von der Leyen cited an oil monarchy (Qatar), a dictatorship allied with authoritarian Turkey (Azerbaijan) and a country under military rule (Egypt)... Playing the white knight calls for spotlessly clean hands. You might think whistleblower Julian Assange, sought by the US and locked up in London, was a dream ...

Putin calls in Assad’s debt

How a Starbucks barista helped spark a unionisation revolution

“By the end of the day American forces had killed 347 to 504 unarmed Vietnamese women, children and old men, and raped 20 women and girls, some as young as 10 years old. The massacre at My Lai was not the only time American troops committed war crimes against Vietnamese civilians, but it was the single worst instance; its severity, its cover-up and the eventual trial of just a handful of the unit’s leaders became a synonym for the entire American war in Vietnam. Rape became such an endemic problem in Charlie Company that one member of its Second Platoon, Michael Bernhardt, assumed that every woman Lieutenant Calley’s platoon came across would be raped within moments. The events at My Lai became public a year later. Several officers were brought to trial in 1971, but only Lieutenant Calley was convicted. He was released from prison in 1974.” Source: The New York Times Wrath of the centurions