Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“ The political and moral deformations and intellectual helplessness of Germany today are more dangerous than at any other time since 1945…  The country that laid waste the moral structure of western society looks feeble again before the economic crises and social breakdowns of capitalism that first produced fascism. Revealingly, the binary of the enlightened west and unenlightened east – once used to authorise the Nazi quest for  Lebensraum  in the east and then adapted to serve cold war policy agendas – is the currency today of far-right nationalists across Israel, Europe and America…  And there was much about western democracies – especially their foundations in white supremacy, and cultures of racism and antisemitism – that allowed Hitler to believe that they would welcome his extermination of Jews.” Related The new German chauvinism  ( an essay in two parts) Germany's reckoning with its past is no longer a model

“[W]hy take the time to engage with global and regional history, international political economy, imperialism theory, and war studies just to find oneself in the uncomfortable position of being at odds with the propaganda and power of Western liberal states and state media and their interests?”

Sudan takes UAE to the ICJ Related UAE 2024

Excerpts from an article by Bénoît Bréville Le Monde Diplomatique, March 2025 How should we interpret the geographical dimension of the party’s growth? Does its rise mean the whole country has shifted to the right? Are its voters mainly motivated by social or cultural issues? It would be more accurate to speak of multiple RN electorates, given that the party has managed to gain a foothold at every level of society.  In the EU election of June 2024, the RN list headed by Jordan Bardella came first in every socio-professional category, achieving 53% among manual workers, 40% among white-collar workers, but also 20% among executives (tying with Raphaël Glucksmann’s centre-left Place Publique). The RN’s base is predominantly working class, made up of people with lower levels of formal education, but it also draws support from sections of the middle class, so most researchers have abandoned trying to draw broad-brush conclusions or working with very large categories. Some have pointed t...

Jean-Michel Aphatie : «  Chaque année, nous commémorons le massacre d’Oradour-sur-Glane, c’est-à-dire le massacre de tout un village. Mais nous en avons fait des centaines en Algérie. Est-ce qu’on en a conscience ?  »

“So far,  HTS  has undertaken no ideological updating. They prefer to maintain a kind of vagueness rather than taking a clear line which might antagonise the conservatives still belonging to the movement. With the fall of Damascus, that ideological clarification is of course more necessary than ever   ; at stake are, on the one hand, the movement’s local acceptance and, on the other, the international recognition of the new Damascus authorities. In fact when the movement’s leaders are asked to define themselves, there are as many different answers as there are individuals questioned. “At present it is a sort of Thermidorian logic – a kind of post-revolutionary moderate pushback – which prevails. The page of Terror has been turned and the movement is banking on the different silent majorities as much to consolidate its grip on domestic affairs and eliminate the remains of a radical minority as to present themselves as a national alternative. “ HTS  is not a ...

“The first is a belief in development, a term for the growing political and economic sophistication that emerges at the level of the nation-state. The second is the idea that development goes through stages — unidirectional phases that cannot be reversed or skipped. The third is a view of development as a homogenizing, Westernizing process, in the sense that nations adopt American values and traditions through capitalist growth. These studies often concluded that newly independent or decolonizing nations should forge closer ties with their former colonizers to attract foreign investment and open themselves up to trade — in short, to become modern. “He never accepted the implication of European superiority, or the small-mindedness of modernization theory, limiting our notion of social progress to technocratic or minimalistic ideas about growth. He preferred thinking in terms of equality: political equality, economic equality, cultural equality. “His experiences in Africa and the ideas o...

“Under President Sissi, Madbouly has become one of the main pillars of the realisation of the regime’s ambitious vision for the development of infrastructures and grandiose urban projects, and it’s just too bad if these are carried out at the expense of social justice and the rights of the poor.” Related Urban transformation:  the Egyptian novel in the sixties

Journalist : M. Ben M'Hidi, don't you think it's a bit cowardly to use women's baskets and handbags to carry explosive devices that kill so many innocent people? Ben M'Hidi :  And doesn't it seem to you even more cowardly to drop napalm bombs on defenseless villages, so that there are a thousand times more innocent victims? Of course, if we had your airplanes it would be a lot easier for us. Give us your bombers, and you can have our baskets. — The Battle of Algiers ,  a 1966 movie   Related The Rebel’s Clinic

“Rather than watching an orchestrated, forgettable set piece featuring smiling foreign dignitaries and heads of state visiting an ever-so-polite president in the Oval Office, it was refreshing to witness a blatant exhibition of the crudeness, rudeness, and brutishness of power politics that usually occurs far, far away from the cameras and, hence, reporters and the public” Related Zelenskyy:  a supporter of Israeli oppression

Sean Starrs’s key points : The global nature of US-led capitalism since 1945, and especially since the 1990s, means that some states can extract vast resources from others. GDP tells us where the world’s production of goods and services is geographically concentrated, but in the age of globalization, it does not tell us who owns and therefore profits from it. Global profit share is a more appropriate measure of national economic power, as it encompasses the global profits stemming from production and finance owned abroad, not just within the home territory. The global dominance of Wall Street (financial services in figure two), for example, helps to ensure that the US dollar remains the de facto world currency. The dominance of American tech firms helps to ensure the continued supremacy of the US military, while the dominance of American media helps to ensure that the US state can shape the ideological narrative (including support for US capitalism and imperialism). The United States c...

Summary points “BIMS registers every refugee life event: from marriage, to education, to death. More than 90 percent of Syrians residing in Za’tari have been forcibly registered into the system as a precondition for receiving aid. “The involvement of tech companies and their products in state-led and international humanitarian work raises serious concerns about how their profit motive might compromise humanitarian principles. In particular, the absence of strong data protection laws renders data a profitable commodity to be bought and sold.  “Knowledge about emergencies and those affected by them is no longer being produced in context but rather through machines and artificial intelligence that dictate how humanitarians should intervene in crisis situations. “There are good reasons to believe that the Herberts of the humanitarian world will save lives and protect humanitarian workers in dangerous situations. But they also represent a new form of robotic intermediation that thr...

Monuments Decolonized

‘But we liberals are not responsible’.  This is just a brief comment as there are many things to say about the editorial. Notice the use of the word ‘imperialism’. Since when the Guardian uses such a term in its editorials? Imperialism did not apply to the ‘liberal order’ prior to Trump except in some articles in the opinion section. “Vance, Elon Musk and hard-right agitators such as Steve Bannon have a vision of a Europe run not by elected liberal-progressive coalitions but by people like themselves.” Trump and ‘new order’ have come out of a blue sky. We were sleeping. The morning after, there was Trump and an ‘illiberal order.”  No historical background, no sociology . The so-called liberal progressives were innocents in the room. They did not have blood in their hands. Nor did they preside over an imperialist international order. Selectivity. Perpetuating Amnesia. Ignoring structure and systemic analysis. Furthermore, their decades had not to do with the political-economic ...

If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality. — Stephen Hawking , 2015

  “[I]f Cuba does not respect its citizenry’s human rights, it is necessary for the beacon of said rights across the water to starve those citizens into revolt. This is a special kind of tough love for the ordinary Cuban that emanates in particular from Florida and New Jersey fogies still embittered over things lost in the revolution; one deep enough to perdure for two thirds of a century, despite being forever in vain – those ordinary Cubans having bafflingly failed, decade after decade, to overthrow their government, however much hunger and desperation they are subjected to.” Abject gesture

A diary from Gaza

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