Skip to main content

Posts

The UN and the Cultural Genocide

[Raphael] Lemkin “ breaks genocide into three types : physical, biological, and cultural. He recognized that the events and processes of genocide, which culminate in the loss of a national, racial, religious, ethnic, or political group in whole or in part, could manifest in multiple ways, for different reasons, and include multiple modes of destruction of the group and its members besides the loss of life. Each type manifests differently, but the end result of each is the same: an irreparable and tragic loss of a culture that carries further implications of their shifted future.  The gruesome and violent physical forms of genocide raise the hairs on our sensibilities, and the biological forms tug on our heartstrings with broken families and mistreatment of women, yet both of these horrible forms of genocide occur as events making them both identifiable with an end. The process of cultural genocide, the grouping left out of the legal definition, is a large scale deletion of a cultur...

Winston Churchill, Imperial Monstrosity

I don’t like Tariq Ali, but the topic is one of my favourites. In his Preface, Tariq Ali makes clear that he does not support toppling Churchill’s statues wherever they stand—but rather, a deeper battle on the field of historiography, against a consensus that “appears hegemonic but remains vulnerable.” This is the context in which  Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes  is written—and in which, if I’m any judge at all, it succeeds admirably. Timidity of a ‘radical’. What about opposing all statues, be it of Churchill, Thatcher, Lenin or Chavez? A review of Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes

France, a Settler Postcolony?

“ In this perverse upending of the very meaning of decolonization, to decolonize France is to rid the nation of the immigrants who are “colonizing” it . Paradoxically, the most vocal advocates of decolonization today are not formerly colonized subjects, but the nativist guardians of the borders of France against the purported invasion of immigrants.”

An Avoidable War?

A leftist detaching the economy and sociology from politics and geopolitics. Is this an approach to counter the liberal and conservative approaches? Maintaining or expanding U.S. hegemony. Yes, but what does that hegemony consist of? What does drive it? Yet it is still worth a read.

‘The Image’ in Islamic Jurisprudence and Art

Can art, and the differences in opinion on it between the Arab and the Western worlds, really explain the violence between the two sides? Are not these attitudes, at odds with one another regarding the depiction of the Prophet, merely a pretext for conflicts with other underlying motivations? Those who endeavor to incite this violence, do they use religion, the Prophet, and images, among other things, to cement their dominance over their local environments? Does successful globalization, wherever the case may be, not exacerbate the pressure on cultural, artistic, and ideological boundaries to adapt and expand? And, in turn, does this pressure not incite “adversarial” and “miserable” and “desperate” situations?  Examining the Past to Understand Present Controversy

Tips to Avoid Stress

 

Sexualisation - an Egyptian Way

 By the Syrian Lamis Kan

Let it Be Known that we Knew Love

Although today there are almost 14000 known nuclear warheads - less than the 50000+ in 1986  - the ’colossal threat is still hanging over our heads’. “Three hundred and eighty million years passed between the appearance of visible life and the moment a butterfly learnt to fly... and then another 180 million years before nature produced a rose, with no other purpose than being beautiful. It took another four geological eras for human beings — unlike our Pithecanthropus great-grandparents — to learn to sing better than birds, and even be able to die of love. It is by no means glorious that men’s talents have ensured, in the golden age of science, that such a colossal, multi-millennial process could return to its original nothingness with the push of a button.” A beautiful depiction by one of the greatest modern novelists

Martial Masculinity and Authoritarian Populism

Thirty-three years after the fall of the Berlin wall, bloc-thinking is back. The democratic “West” against the authoritarian “East”. Authoritarian alliances in the “West” recede into the backdrop, critique of liberal democracy’s chronic shadows grow silent. States recently accused of threatening democracy and the rule of law are embraced. They belong once again to the democratic “We”. With the war in Ukraine, authoritarianism in the “West” is externalized to the Putin regime. But authoritarian populism has been growing in Europe for a long time in the midst of liberal democracy, in states that claim to be illiberal, but not only there. The pandemic has intensified this neoliberal-authoritarian transformation. When uncertainties increase and bring about the compulsion to control, all sides take recourse to identitarianisms, as if there had never been a critique of it. If we want to understand democracy in a fundamentally different way — without the nation, without the people, without bl...

Starmer the Human Rights Lawyer

“ There was no reference to apartheid , and no reference, even, to a fifty-five-year-long illegal occupation. Worse, he drew on racist anti-Palestinian tropes about Israel having been founded in an empty land, in wilful denial of the Nakba. To add insult, all of this was delivered in the presence of Tzipi Hotovely, the Israeli ambassador, with her own  track record  of egregious racism—including opposing Jews marrying Palestinians.”

The British Labour Party: The Starmer Project

“Sir Keir’s record shows his evolution into an unabashed authoritarian. As a young lawyer from a Labour-voting family, he dedicated significant time and energy to liberal causes, using his natural diligence to win a number of worthy cases against powerful interests […] his identification with socialists and environmentalists was always secondary to his ambition and the conformist reflexes that came with it.” A Journey to the Right

CO2 Emission: The U.S. Military Compared

 

Global Capitalism

Global capitalism is what it is not only because it is global but, above all, because it is capitalist. The problems we associate with globalization - the social injustices, the growing gap between rich and poor, ‘democratic deficits’, ecological degradation, and so on - are there not simply because the economy is ‘global’, or because global corporations are uniquely vicious, or even because they are exceptionally powerful. These problems exist because capitalism, whether national or global, is driven by certain systemic imperatives, the imperatives of competition, profit-maximization and accumulation, which inevitably require putting ‘exchange-value’ before ‘use-value’ and profit before people. Even the most benign or ‘responsible’ corporation cannot escape these compulsions but must follow the laws of the market in order to survive - which inevitably means putting profit above all other considerations, with all its wasteful and destructive consequences. These compulsions also require...

England: 44% of Teachers Plan to Quit

“ We remain a profession with amongst the highest number of unpaid working hours, and we are still well above the international average for hours worked by teachers. This is simply unsustainable and can only lead to burnout.” Unmanageable workloads, stress and level of trust in teachers are key factors