Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The claim was  global expansion and harmonious development of the productive forces and resources of the world .  The 2008-09 crisis, the Arab uprisings and social movements in the West itself, wars and civil wars, migration, fall in living standards for many people, environmental degradation, rise of neofascism and more racism, increase in inequality and corruption, the handling of the pandemic and vaccine apartheid … has exposed what ‘globalisation’ has really meant.

A short story by Zakaria Tamer

A short story by Zakaria Tamer

Since nudity is not a central topic in the film, as the writers state, why is the headline Nudity Overshadows Betrayal in ‘Huda’s Salon’ ? Nudity overshadows betrayal is in the Arab critics reviews of the film, not in the film itself.

“I see my granddaughters running away in panic,” Guterres said. “The war is an absurdity in the 21st century. The war is evil. There is no way a war can be acceptable in the 21st century.” One wonders what subject(s) Antonio Guterres studied at university. Political economy, security, war studies, international relations? None of  these subjects describes war as an absurdity. In fact, he was a student in engineering and telecommunications, not in the humanities. Apparently, the Portuguese Socialist Party never educated him in the subject of war or political economy. Leaving aside that UN secretary general is fundamentally wrong about what war is, has he ever said that what has happened in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Ethiopia, for instance, are ‘absurdities’ in the 21st century? Isn’t he another Westerner shocked by a war in a ‘civilised’ country/region using different measurements and criteria?

The French who voted for Macron and those before him, who dined, wined, and had a laugh with Egypt’s dictators from Mubarak to Sisi, did they have the complicity of the people they voted for and their own in mind or only their salaries, the cost of living and similar issues? Eyewitness: journalist and activist Solafa Magdy

Contrary to what the headline states, Taiwan, Japan, Australia, South Korea and India are not competing for supremacy. They are subordinate states to the U.S. The latter has ‘supremacy’. And because the U.S. cannot control everything everywhere, forges alliances with subordinate states to protect the flow and accumulation of capital.  ‘The countries competing for supremacy’

The digital age is destroying us

A free ebook  Direct Action and the Future of the Global Climate Movement

–Ishmahil Blagrove, Facebook, 22 April 2022

This is a very good novel. Extracts from The Sympathiser by Viet Thanh Nguyen The month in question was April, the cruelest month. It was the month in which a war that had run on for a very long time would lose its limbs, as is the way of wars. It was a month that meant everything to all the people in our small part of the world and nothing to most people in the rest of the world. In this gloomiest of Aprils, faced with this question of what should be done, the general who always found something to do could no longer do so. A man who had faith in the mission civilisatrice and the American Way was at last bitten by the bug of disbelief. In those days, when the CIA was the OSS, Ho Chi Minh looked to them for help in fighting the French. He even quoted America’s Founding Fathers in his declaration of our country’s independence.  In this jackfruit republic that served as a franchise of the United States, Americans expected me to be like those millions who spoke no English, pidgin Engl...

Movies were America’s way of softening up the rest of the world, Hollywood relentlessly assaulting the mental defenses of audiences with the hit, the smash, the spectacle, the blockbuster, and, yes, even the box office bomb. It mattered not what story these audiences watched. The point was that it was the American story they watched and loved, up until the day that they themselves might be bombed by the planes they had seen in American movies. – Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathiser , 2015 ed., chapter 11

   ارفضوا دعاية صندوق النقد الدولي

[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...

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

‘There are common features between historical fascism and the far right’

“ 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 alternative to monetary or wage policy

A new history of revolution

Although the articles requires a subscription, what is accessible is already most of it. The Need to Mount Long-Term Resistance to Totalitarianism and Ethnonationalist Chauvinism