Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

 

What we can do is raise the demand for peace and for the British government to get off its bellicose high horse. Tory machismo at the expense of other people’s lives needs to be replaced by serious support for a diplomatic end to the war. Even President Zelensky knows the danger. There is a Nato camp, he said last week, which doesn’t “mind a long war because it would mean exhausting Russia, even if this means the demise of Ukraine and comes at the cost of Ukrainian lives.”

When they commit them, they are war crimes . When we do it, it’s fighting insurgents and terrorists; it’s a mistake or they were rogue soldiers involved; or it’s a collateral damage. I think the article concludes with a utopian vision in the current international balance of powers and the prospects of more wars and instability. Who is going to make the ICC function impartially in every war?  One needs to question the existing regimes East and West and interconnect wars with major social and political-economic issues engulfing the world. Listing war crimes committed by ‘liberal democrats’ and authoritarians, does not go beyond recalling events that have become common knowledge and exposing hypocrisy and double standards that many ordinary people have already noticed. More than ever the type of journalism required today is radical, ‘extremist’ journalism in a very extremist world; as Mark Mazower put it, we urgently need a journalism that is able to “ overcome  the frangmentatio...

While there is no organized Muslim community in France, Muslims tend to mostly cast a left-wing vote. To me, such a vote cannot be qualified as a religious vote, but should rather be understood as a social vote.” A look at recent elections

I have lived in this area for 18 years. I have never seen ‘love’ extended to Iraqis and Afghanis adorning shop windows in London, for example.

A reply to Stathis Kouvelakis

Greek railroad workers as an example

I disagree with Callinicos’s position on Syriza though. It sounds an ultra-leftist stance for me, and he does not specify when Syriza should have been opposed before the capitulation of Alexis Tsipras or after. A reply to Paul Mason

“Even if I’m cut to pieces, the people won’t let your British lackey rule. You slaves!” The Times ran a series, likely drafted by the notorious academic spy Ann Lambton, describing the oil nationalisation crisis as a product of the faulty “Persian character", while “the horse-faced Oriental” Mosaddegh was a hysterical symptom of an old feudal order that couldn’t take responsibility for its own shortcomings. Can the prime minister, a seasoned politician three decades his senior, not see the British themselves are ruthless? That they are trying to starve the people into submission with sanctions? That they provoke the religious fundamentalists who shot him, leaving him with this shattered leg, forever leaning on a cane to just get across a room? In the service of US and British geopolitical interests

 Her awful, awful career

US chief executives are on track to reap record rewards this year, raising the prospect of fresh clashes with investors and employees as the gap between their earnings and those of their staff widens to a historic multiple in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.  For the 280 S&P 500 companies that have reported figures this year, the median chief executive’s pay has jumped to a record $14.2mn for 2021, up from $13.5mn in 2020, according to ISS Corporate Solutions, a data provider.  Equilar, another data company that tracks chief executive rewards at the biggest companies by revenue, said the median among 196 companies that have reported this year has rocketed 20 per cent to $14.3mn, after having dipped to $12mn in 2020. Among the largest executive pay packages to have been announced were David Zaslav’s $247mn at Discovery, Pat Gelsinger’s $178.6mn at Intel and Andy Jassy’s $212.7mn at Amazon — which was made public the same day workers in New York voted to form Amazon’s firs...

What are the historical links?

“Neither the respectable left nor the hardline liberals can explain how spiralling ‘punishments’ are meant to bring a quick end to the war, still less a lasting peace.”  Invasion of Ukraine: more on hypocrisy, warmongering and the innocent abroad

Definition of ‘globalisation’ aside, it is very interesting to follow the arguments of liberals. BlackRock chief executive Larry Fink’s proclamation last week stated that “the Russian invasion of Ukraine has put an end to the globalisation we have experienced over the last three decades”. As he put it, the war marks “a turning point in the world order of geopolitics, macroeconomic trends, and capital markets”. Rana Foroohar of the Financial Times argues that  “we won’t see a 1930s-style meltdown but rather a new kind of regionalisation that will replace what came before. I’ve been arguing for some time that regional trading blocs are the only way forward given the mercantilist reality of China’s current system, which is simply incompatible with the rules of the World Trade Organization. I think the big question is whether we move towards a bipolar system, with the US and Europe (and whichever OECD nations decide to come along with them) creating some new structures, particularly f...

Deterring the U.S. Related For nearly 30 years, Russia has been enabling China’s rise as a military power. Russian weapons producers have supplied the People’s Liberation Army with missiles, helicopters and advanced fighter jets to the tune of an average of $1.5bn a year.  Now, the tide is turning. As reported by the Financial Times this month, Russia has requested military assistance from China to maintain its invasion of Ukraine. According to intelligence the US shared with allies, Russia requested supplies including surface-to-air missiles, drones, intelligence-related equipment and armoured and logistics vehicles. Sipri’s arms transfers database, which tracks deals from 1950 to 2021, records scores of Russian weapons exports to China, with none going the other way. But China is clearly outgrowing its traditional reliance on Russian for supplies of advanced arms. China spent more than three times as much on defence as Russia in 2020. Source: Financial Times Imperialist Keynesian...

Avoidable Covid-19 deaths were significantly higher in the most deprived areas in England Age-standardised avoidable mortality rates (per 100,000 people) with an underlying cause of Covid-19 in England, 2020 Most deprived Males 95.1 Females  53.3 Least deprived Males  21.9 Females  9.4 Figures are for deaths registered in each calendar year and exclude deaths of non-residents.  Source:   ONS – Deaths registered in England Death rates expose health inequalities

  When people ranging from seasoned American idiot Thomas Friedman to Israeli best-selling author Yuval Noah Harari come together to argue Putin’s adventurism in Ukraine is unlike anything we have seen before and is a turning point in human history, it is hard not to bury your head in your pillow and wonder where have these people been over the last two decades of US military thuggery around the globe. Ceasing to follow the propaganda machinery of Russia and the US, the world would be much better off turning to Gogol, a Ukrainian master of Russian literature, and in the liminal space he crafts in his superior literary heritage, thinking where the real borders lie between civilisation and barbarities. Biden Putin or Gogol

A battlefield between workers and corporatisation

Irish law maker speaks out