Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“The aggressive transmutation of ruling regimes into warring garrison states presiding over competitive military industrial complexes has degenerated all these states into alien powers treating entire nations as their military bases.” The rise of Iran’s military-industrial complex

 “He was only Isis because he had to accept the reality,” said Ayad of the herder who had pointed him to an underground bonanza. “He wanted a cut too. The spoils of war are fair game.” The search of IS’s hidden loot

“The problem of the Reformists was—and is—that they want to create a series of changes with little danger while also preserving and boosting the system. But the hope-giving movement of today is free from the shrapnel of political Islam, and this is clear from its slogans. In order to explain what it wants and does not want, this generation of protestors has not resorted to any concept that has a religious or even quasi-religious pedigree, and this is a great accomplishment. This method and path were completely intuitive and arose out of the protestor’s collective wisdom.” And that is not an exception. Whether in Tunisia and Egypt or Libya and Syria, the 2011 uprisings, and later the 2019 uprisings in Sudan and Algeria, did not resort to religious slogans and concepts. “ One of the reasons for this accomplishment is that the current movement, in a completely self-motivated fashion, did not seek any coalition with the present political structure, because fundamentally, it had no relation...

A must read. The debt of Tunisia and Egypt in the 19th century and the colonisation of the two countries by France and Britain The analysis includes a critique of  Ali Coşkun Tunçer‘s chapter  in  Sovereign Debt Diplomacies: Rethinking Sovereign Debt from Colonial Empires to Hegemony.

 تحليل منظمة "الديمقراطية الآن للعالم العربي"

The UK has the oldest, draughtiest and least energy-efficient homes in Europe yet they are ‘fetishised’, says the philosopher Julian Baggini. I like the emphasis on class in an article by the FT.

David Graeber vs Yuval Harari Related The Daw of Everything — a review

Full access to the article requires subscription. Apart from what is already available , here are some more excerpts: “ The surveillance goes beyond keeping tabs on Islamist preachers and foreign workers. Because the government has majority holdings in telecoms operators Etisalat and Du (formerly the Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company), the security services are able to monitor all communications on their networks. The UAE buys the technology to do this from Western companies such as McAfee. Shires says it’s likely that ‘Abu Dhabi has passively collected the data and provided it to Washington’ as part of the ‘war on terror’. After 9/11, it was the Arab Spring that contributed the most to the government’s determination to monitor and repress those it considered ‘internal enemies’. ‘2011 was a turning point in security terms — a brutal one,’ one of the academics who had asked for anonymity recalled. Former US National Security Agency (NSA) officer Lori Stroud told Reuters tha...

 Humanity’s longer war against darkness

“My wish, perhaps like the wishes of millions of Iranians, is to see that these neglected demands of the diverse social groups and classes in this country are fulfilled, with the least cost to human lives and their material infrastructure and without any interference of foreign powers.” An interview with Asef Bayat

A review of Helen Thompson’s Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century

Overview Legacies

by Dilar Dirik 

An easy read of an important topic. I wonder how could this ‘degrowth’ be implemented without the question of state, ownership, profit, etc. is even posited? Invoking ‘the fundamentals of the economic system’ without mentioning them and the class and power relations interlocking those fundamentals, leaves any clear alternative an open question. A review

I liked this Turkish series.

   عربي استعادته قبيلته مقابل تيس وآخر أبطل بالضحك صلاة هارون الرشيد

Killed only 25. What a mediocrity! A medieval prince would have killed a much higher number of ‘baddies’. Wasted tax payers money by the MoD. The British Army had “trained me to ‘other’ them, and they had trained me well” "We'd been given a meta-narrative, which we now recalled: We were a Christian army, fighting a militia sympathetic to Muslims ," he writes. With his tour in Iraq prematurely over, Harry turned to the consumption of copious amounts of alcohol, particularly Southern Comfort and sambuca, to deal "with unsorted anger, and guilt about not being at war - not leading my lads". Harry recalls telling his commander that unless he was sent back to a conflict area, he would "have to quit the army". Harry recalls wanting to use an almost one-tonne bomb on his first attempted air strike on a suspected Taliban position, which even his American counterparts saw as too much, something he jokingly thought as "very un-American".

 

To put it bluntly, I don’t think hope is a scientific category. And I don’t think that people fight or stay the course because of hope, I think people do it out of love and anger. Everybody always wants to know: Aren’t you hopeful? Don’t you believe in hope? To me, this is not a rational conversation. I try and write as honestly and realistically as I can. And you know, I see bad stuff. I see a city decaying from the bottom up. I see the landscapes that are so important to me as a Californian dying, irrevocably changed. I see fascism. I’m writing because I’m hoping the people who read it don’t need dollops of hope or good endings but are reading so that they’ll know what to fight, and fight even when the fight seems hopeless. — Mike Davis, Los Angeles Times, 2022

I would use the word "Russian imperialism" cautiously, though. The rest stands accurate in my view. Richard Seymour in 2015: An unabashed mobilisation of ancient colonial binaries, with Russian imperialism cast as the guardian of secular, modern, liberal civilization against a barbarian ISIS. Its author has stated the upshot of this perspective quite explicitly : "kill them all". Or, to put it another way, exterminate the brutes. One is reminded of peak Hitchens, and of the traditions of imperialist apologia that he more or less deliberately evoked. And one is impressed by how deep this goes in parts of the left. Of course, Russian imperialism is not defending secular liberalism; that's not how imperialism works. And its targets are demonstrably much broader than ISIS. Of course, the Assad dictatorship is much more steeped in blood than ISIS at this point. The colonial unconscious, even if it has no history, should be placed in historical context. In the afterma...