Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“The current confrontation in Venezuela today is not between left and right.” “We are witnessing the transition from a government with authoritarian tendencies to a dictatorial regime.” “This is not a government ‘backed’ by the military, but, as Maduro himself has said, the government is led by a ‘civilian-military-police alliance’. “Those who continue to support Maduro, including parties and movements of the Sao Paulo Forum or the spokespersons of Podemos in Spain, are causing severe damage to the left in the region and the world. They are damaging anti-capitalist struggles in the broadest sense.” The US embargo is ‘in violation of international law’. This is a useless statement repeated a million times, and it has come back again during the ongoing Israel’s genocidal war. “[A]fter the failure of the current, self-defined “socialist” governments, Venezuelan society tends to associate any reference to socialism or the left with the corruption and authoritarianism of the Maduro governme...

Mark Curtis pays tribute to John Pilger Related   The War on Democracy documentary

It is “paramount to follow the energy supply chains from the point of extraction to their point of use in Israeli military vehicles.” “BP is responsible; BP is guilty. BP must be forced to stop supplying fuel to the genocidal Zionist entity. And while the supply chain for the BTC pipeline begins in Azerbaijan, all of BP’s business is supposedly carried out with the consent and support of the British public.” How an Israeli genocidal war is enabled  Related Anglo Arabia  by David Wearing, Polity 2018

Today’s Imperialist Clashes ‘Are Driven by Economic Rivalry’ A must read Unlike classical imperialism, write Costas Lapavitsas  the driving force of contemporary imperialism  “springs from this pairing of internationalized industrial with internationalized financial capital. Neither dominates the other and there is no fundamental clash between them. Jointly they comprise the most aggressive form of capital known to history.” And  this pairing of capitals  “thrives on unfettered access to global natural resources, cheap labor power, low taxation, loose environmental standards, and markets for its industrial, commercial, and financial components. The United States will obviously not submit to the challenge and draws on its vast military, political, and monetary power to protect its hegemony. That makes it the main threat to world peace.”  It implies there is now a world peace that is under threat. I don’t think there is world peace. “The socialist left must oppose...

“The Sahel – like the Horn, where the Gulf-led proxy war in Yemen is spilling over – is  at the centre of what some are calling the ‘new scramble for Africa ’.”  However, the recent events in Tinzaouaten suggest “that private military companies and militias are no panacea, and that after the failures of French stabilisation missions, they too will likely struggle to realise their interests in the region.”

 One among the rare ones

“[T]he vilification of migrants and Muslims forms part of a primitive persecutory phantasy, shaped by the UK’s colonial history and by its entrenched material disparities.” “[I]t would be more accurate to view contemporary British bordering as a continuation of colonial violence: an attempt to police the nation’s last frontier, so that the wealth and status gained from imperial conquest is preserved, materially and symbolically – and withheld from former colonial subjects.” This goes with the rhetoric of politicians who stress that UK needs migrants, but they have to be skilled ones and the country ‘legally’. They did not mind before – in fact encouraged – the hundreds of thousands of Polish and others, many of whom were unskilled, when British capital needed cheap labour. During the ‘great boom’ of capitalism in the 1959s and 1960s liberal democracy could thrive at home without the need to scapegoat the Other. On the contrary, many workers from India, Pakistan and the Caribbean were e...

“[S]uspension of normal safeguards was often unjustifiable, costing the public purse billions and eroding trust in political institutions.” Billions? Hang on. What about the migrants?  An aspect of ‘our values’

We have a massive capitalist crisis on our hands with right-wing nationalist forces in most EU countries, absorbing social discontent, and a collapsing liberal center. To advocate in this scenario, as  Steffan Wyn-Jones  reminded me, a left-wing populism and nationalism that often overlaps with right-wing political recipes – even finding a temporary, if ambiguous, common ground (whether Golden Dawn in Greece, AfD in Germany, the Front National in France, or UKIP in Britain) – by invoking [Carl] Schmitt seems to me disastrous. After all, National Socialism thrived on the same amalgamation of left and right motives and constituencies during its rise to power, before any dreams of populist socialism were ended in the “night of the long knives” once the Nazis were in power. It may be naïve, but a broad-based transnational alliance of progressive forces seems to me the only remotely acceptable and realistic way forward.          — Benno Teschke , 2016

A must read Unlike classical imperialism, write Costas Lapavitsas   the driving force of contemporary imperialism   “springs from this pairing of internationalized industrial with internationalized financial capital. Neither dominates the other and there is no fundamental clash between them. Jointly they comprise the most aggressive form of capital known to history.” And   this pairing of capitals  “thrives on unfettered access to global natural resources, cheap labor power, low taxation, loose environmental standards, and markets for its industrial, commercial, and financial components. The United States will obviously not submit to the challenge and draws on its vast military, political, and monetary power to protect its hegemony. That makes it the main threat to world peace. The socialist left must oppose imperialism, while recognizing that the United States is the main aggressor. But that ought to be done from an independent position that is openly anti-capitalis...

Ireland-US-Israel-Palestine

“The latest war in Gaza is unlike previous struggles between Israel and Palestinians,” writes Hicham Alaoui. So Israel too has been waging a struggle? What kind of a struggle is it? “The ongoing conflict [?] embodies a dramatic reconfiguration of regional order in the Middle East that no longer abides by old sectarian schisms.” And further down: “No longer does the Sunni-Shi‘a split shape its outlook, as in the past two decades.”  ‘No longer’?    The is a swallowing of the myth of a ‘sectarian’ conflict propagated after the invasion of Iraq the after 2011 uprisings. One can only wonder how come that in very few years sectarianism that had shaped the region’s outlook was ‘no longer’. (see Ussama Makdisi’s paper The Mythology of the Sectarian Middle East , 2017) “So long as Hamas holds power over its fiefdom, its quest to hijack the Palestinian cause will remain intact…” Needs elaboration. Are we saying those who voted for Hamas were victims of a hijacking or they had just ...

They don’t only tacitly support killing of Palestinians, they create the circumstances of a killing machine at home then they put the blame on someone else.

A liberal view that reflects liberal anxiety of a phenomenon of their own creation  The author’s profile says it all. Note that there is not a single word about Palestine and Germany’s complicity in a genocidal war.  “While in the Weimar Republic a century ago, demagogues and populists thrived on “othering” German Jews, today this “other” is the migrant - more specifically,  those with Muslim backgrounds .”

The corporate media would not publish this as they did with the Chinese ‘Tank Man’. 

‘How ancient India shaped the West’ Related The geopolitical origins of capitalism

A very good piece “To understand the flammable situation at which the pyromaniac far right has taken aim,  we need less mass psychology and more political economy .”

In defence of life and breath

  الليبراليون الأمريكان والليبراليون العراقيون

One wants to break free of the past: rightly, because nothing at all can live in its shadow, and because there will be no end to the terror as long as guilt and violence are repaid with guilt and violence; wrongly, because the past that one would like to evade is still very much alive.    —Theodor W. Adorno