Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

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Race as a social construct Related The invention of 'heterosexuality'

Free jailed union leaders Solidarity with teachers Support TikTok workers

“The struggle for a Free Palestine is a fight against the same systems driving climate collapse: extractivism, militarism, and capitalism . Palestine's struggle mirrors every frontline community fighting to survive capitalism's fires and floods. From  Yemen  to  Niger Delta  to  Central India , the lesson is the same: our chains are linked.” Build more weapons

 

An authoritarian who cannot deliver economically, resorts to repression. It is not very different from what Turkey's Erdoğan is doing. Lenghthy prison terms to opposition figures

Vidal disdains the U.S. power elite not because it oppresses the common man but because it savages his own vision of America, a history-steeped mythos that ignores (when it doesn't condemn) the multicultural realities of today's nation. — Louis Bayard

Solidarity with Palestine “Break relations with the genocidal state of Israel” Related The President of Chile Gabriel Boric has been described by  The Economist  as " woke " and as part of the  millennial left , "with a program focused on social justice, human rights, the environment and feminism". Boric has expressed support for the  State of Palestine  on multiple occasions. In 2019, after receiving a gift from the Jewish Community of Chile, he called for Israel to return the occupied Palestinian territories in a tweet.  He described Israel as a "genocidal and murderous state" that violates international treaties, stressing the importance of defending international principles and human rights regardless of a country's power.  Boric refuted accusations of  antisemitism , asserting his rejection of all forms of discrimination. He considers the Israeli occupation of territories beyond the  1967 borders  as a violation of international la...

For many, the memory of the Holocaust as a break with civilization is the moral foundation of the Federal Republic. To compare it with other genocides is therefore considered a heresy, an apostasy from the right faith. It is time to abandon this catechism .

“There can for present purposes be no question that there is sufficient evidence that the UAE is not only failing to prevent genocide, but is also complicit in genocide .”

This is a good perspective that has helped me have a clearer picture. The tariffs are not a response to the decline of American capitalism. The legitimation crisis from which Trumpism emerged was a result of the  strength  of American capital, not its decline. Trump claims that the  result of concessions made by prior administrations in order to bring other states into the US-led system have diminished American economic and political supremacy. A plan that would involve pushing finance off its pedestal and replacing it to some extent with domestic manufacturing. Globalization cannot simply be reversed at the stroke of a pen. Its unravelling would involve much more than simply imposing tariffs*; it would require an array of capital controls as well as a comprehensive industrial policy – measures that would constitute a more serious challenge to the dominant fractions of capital than anything Trump is willing to contemplate. Tariffs on their own are insufficient to r...

Freedom in capitalist markets entails the freedom of property owners to use and dispose of their property, including the freedom of business owners to run their businesses as little dictatorships, not as representative polities. You do not elect your boss, let alone vote on your wages or working hours. The political scientists Corey Robin and Alex Gourevitch have argued that workplaces are fundamentally places of unfreedom—many workers do not even have enough individual liberty to decide when to go to the bathroom without their bosses’ permission. — Trevor Jackson , The New York Review of Books, 2024

Camilla Vallejo has made  anti-Zionist  remarks during her political career. In 2016 she called  Israel  "a terrorist State that seeks the displacement and extermination of Palestinians", and that the " Palestinian–Israeli conflict does  not constitute a war, but a genocide". She stated that "[t]his is not about  antisemitism  ... I emphatically condemn ... the impunity of a Zionist project that violates all international law, that seeks to oppress and exterminate a brother nation.”

The German court logic: if you can survive by working illegally, then you don’t need rights . If your suffering is managed by another member state, then the system has done its job. “Europe’s asylum system is no longer about protection, if it ever was. It’s about containment, outsourcing, and denial.”

I hadn't realised I “ signed up to work on code that directly powers war crimes" . 

Blaming China is part of finding-someone-to-blame tradition. The Muslim, the migrant, the Russian, the unions, the West vs. 'Islam', etc. Years of stagnation, decline in competition with China, rentier economies inabilities to resume capitalist growth after 2008/2009, etc. have created tensions among capitalist states. Forget the cheap goods enjoyed by Westerners for years. Forget the billions made by Western multinationals in China.  US's protectionism and relative decline is just one of the outcomes of 'globalisation'. China is now a demon and the 'the innocent West’ is a victim that must do something to stop its relative economic decline/stagnation. Rearmament is meant for China, not Russia .  “Structurally, this crisis is one of overaccumulation.  Chronic stagnation places mounting pressure on the political and military agents of transnational capital to crack open new spaces of accumulation.”  Meanwhile, let's focus on Trump's unpreditable decision...

Lawyer Michael Mansfield: “ If one of our nationals is committing ​an offence , we ought to be doing something about it​. Even if we can’t stop the government of foreign countries behaving badly, we can at least stop our nationals from behaving badly.” It means “our government” is not behaving badly, i.e. the denial of British regime's tacit support of genocide. It means only 10 bad apples, 10 bad dual nationals, have 'behaved badly'. Barrister Sean Summerfield: “ The public will be shocked…”  Would they?

By Richard Seymour On the one hand, it is obvious that the recent rise of right-wing nationalism has something to do with the economy, and specifically with the global financial crash of 2008. The electoral record in Europe between 1870 and 2014 suggests that voters generally respond to financial crises by moving to the right, with the far right gaining the most. On average, far-right parties increase their vote share by 30 per cent after such a crisis. On the other hand, decades of research have failed to find any evidence that voters respond to personal economic suffering by punishing the incumbent. Belonging to a group whose economic interests have been directly harmed seems only rarely to change political preferences. We are passionate animals. Passion, as Karl Marx wrote, is our ‘essential force’. To understand what’s happening today, we must return to the passions. Among the passions, the most important for this chapter is resentment. For good reasons, resentment is seen as a dis...

“In reality, the liberal European "civilised" rhetoric about how Europe and its white settler-colonies have supposedly learned their lesson from the Nazi genocide and become "enlightened" is nothing more than drivel, something the peoples of Asia and Africa have long recognised. The genocidal Israeli and US policies and plans for the Palestinians today are simply a continuation of the centuries-long European and American savagery against the colonised .”

Pankaj Mishra, author of The World After Gaza : “If you are going to remain a person with a conscience, then you've got to reconsider many of your alliances and professional relationships, or you stay within those institutions and become dead inside.” Pankaj, you have stirred your finger in my wound, as I carry on being complicit in genocide unable to break away from the web I am entangled in.