Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Main points in this very illuminating piece . To what extent are Nairn’s argument and dissection relevant to today’s Britain?  Britain is … a description of the projection of imperial power out of a core whose boundaries remain misty, miasmic, and amorphous. There is, therefore, something very anachronistic about Britain: it is a nation which seems to exist with one foot in modernity and another in a mutant feudal-imperial past. Scotland had been forced to share an admittedly rather cramped first-class carriage dominated by England — it had  not,  however, been kicked into the luggage hold. The Scottish historian Tom Nairn (1932-2023) proclaimed  that: “Scotland will be free when the last minister is strangled by the last copy of the  Sunday Post .” For Nairn, there was no guarantee of justice in independence, only the possibility. Indeed, the current dominance of a Conservative, rather than a progressive, opposition in the devolved parliament supports this conc...

 انحطاط الوضع الاقتصادي المصري

“The question is whether the welcome justice mobilization around the horrors he [Putin] has visited on Ukraine will also be applied to crimes committed by powerful Western actors.” Here are the limitations of Reed Brody’s analysis : “ Any state could find a basis in law for almost any action, because ‘for every claim there is a counter-claim, and legalist opposition to war is therefore ultimately toothless ’.” Realists see the basis of global relations in the clash of state power. They are sceptical of ideas like globalisation and sceptical of the idea of international society. For them international law is no more than ‘a moralistic gloss on power politics’. It plays a useful role in obscuring the extent to which power is still the central determinant of how the world works. The US wants and needs international law – consider the issue of patent protection or intellectual property rights, and so on. Yet it also needs its own freedom of manoeuvre. Because the US is the world’s most pow...

British newspapers fall dramatically short Related Barcelona freezes ties with Israel

“A History of California, Capitalism, and the World”?  Even the review does tell us almost nothing about how much Malcolm Harris incorporates ‘the world’ in his book. “ Malcolm Harris’s new book shows how Californian capitalism has thrived by exploiting an unequal world.” Which world? the world from Mexico to China and from Congo to India? Not a world about how the title relates to this world. The review informs us that the book is about California and capitalism. Nick Burns: “Most glaring is the mismatch between the book’s stated purpose and its actual content.  For most of its 700 frustrating pages,  Palo Alto  refuses to be the very thing it insists that it is: a history of capitalism. A “fitting bookend to Harris’s opening, equally earnest assertion that Palo Alto is “haunted” not only by the spectre of communism but also by supernatural forces – hardly suits the sober realism that the book’s subject demands.”

Although many countries rushed to offer co-operation and aid to Turkey and Syria in the immediate aftermath of the quakes, Ilan Kelman, professor of disasters and health at University College London was not optimistic. His research on “disaster diplomacy” suggested that natural disasters did not create peace. “Aside from the logistical challenges of humanitarian aid amid places of violence, experience demonstrates that, sadly, previous enmity tends to supersede saving lives and stopping war over the long term,” Kelman said . ‘Natural’ disasters are not wholly natural and the word natural should be in inverted commas. Disaster-related activities do and do not influence conflict and cooperation

A revolutionary movement without a revolutionary change

‘Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe’

“Then, as now, there’s something particularly vile – if you’ll permit the term – about the US telling its proxy warriors: we must be united in the defence of democracy and freedom against authoritarianism; we’ll arm you, but you do the dying. Oh, and your country will be pulverised in the process. (‘ Armiamoci e partite ’ was a popular early twentieth-century riposte to such militarism.) The similarities don’t stop there. The strongest resemblance between past and present lies in the elite somnambulism bringing us to the brink of world war and nuclear holocaust. It’s simply not the case that if one side is wrong, the other must be right; the negation of a falsehood is not by definition true. Everyone can be in the wrong, everyone can be lying.” Sleepwalking elites

David Hearst.: “ Britain offered $2.7bn in arms to Ukraine and $6m in disaster relief for 23 million people in Turkey and Syria? Is this for real? Apparently yes. ” I think this is a simplistic argument, especially that Hearst does not explain the reasons. There are priorities that dictate the big powers policies, including the UK’s. And those priorities are not new and one needs to mention and explain them. Talking about ‘morality’ or ‘a moral duty’ is misleading and throwing dust in the eyes.

Human rights organisation accuse UK Foreign Office of a ‘misleading’ and ‘inaccurate’ report .

عماد أبو اشتية – رسام وفنان تشكيلي أردني فلسطيني 

I did not know that it was so good until I started watching. Plot summary . With English subtitles , but you may need a VPN.

كارثة سوريا الكبرى هي النظام  

‘Freedom of speech’, again!

“Given the specific form American power has taken since the second world war – a global empire of capital – the significant thing about military emissions is not so much their magnitude as the reason they are generated in the first place: namely, the Pentagon’s need to maintain unparalleled supremacy in order to underwrite a much wider, ecologically ruinous regime of accumulation. Washington’s role as guardian of global capital – and the military’s role as coercive guarantor of that position – is conterminous with what environmental historians call ‘the great acceleration’.  The advent of the ‘Anthropocene’ and the spread of American-led transnational capitalism are intertwined. As such, the Pentagon’s deadly atmospheric legacy far outstrips the effect of its own emissions. With the left in purgatory, it is understandable that scholars like Michael Klare should hope for Washington to take up the mantle of planetary rescue. The notion that there might be anything ethically palatable...

No bigger picture, no bigger context A tip of the iceberg of the barbarity of French colonialism

The emergence of a ruling class?

Arguable, but very interesting. An interview with the author. Here are the main arguments in case you cannot access the article . “Constant emphasis on racial and ethnic disparities diverts public attention from the growing class divide in the West between the college-educated overclass and the working class. The nation-state is the only unit of government that has been able to mobilise extra-political popular sentiments and national identity to improve the condition of the majority of people, not just an oligarchy or aristocracy. The actual ruling class in the US and similar Western democracies is not a tiny number of freakishly rich individuals, or heirs and heiresses, but the top 10 or 15 per cent of the population – almost all of them with college diplomas and often graduate or professional degrees. I was criticised for arguing in  The New Class War  that education, not income, is the major dividing line between classes in the modern West.  There are two working class...

Names and faces