NM's blog

Sharaa’s authoritarian centralisation stumbles in Suweida

A long [6400 words] but good summary and analysis by Adam Shatz . Here is a selection: – The United States has given its imprimatur to Israel’s regional hegemony. – When Trump made plain that he wanted Israel to stop bombing [Iran], Netanyahu had little choice but to acquiesce. – Israel also appears to be pursuing a long-range plan to weaken, if not to render defenceless, the other states in the region, so that none is in a position to challenge it. The instability and precariousness of such an order are evident to American and European politicians, but they prefer to remain discreet about them for fear of being accused of sympathy for Hamas or antisemitism. – For all Trump’s triumphalism, the ‘twelve-day war’, far from having ended Iran’s search for a nuclear weapon, may accelerate it. – Israel now has control of the airspace over Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria – almost boundless room for manoeuvre – and has always favoured unilateral military assertion over diplomacy. – Netanyahu ...

Santiago, 15 July 2025  

"Inequalities in access to vacations have remained stagnant in France for around forty years. Four out of ten French people still cannot afford to go on a trip. In a context where poverty in France has reached 'a level unmatched in nearly 30 years,' according to INSEE [ L'Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques],  this trend is unlikely to reverse."

By Richard Seymour At the origin of modern political conspiracism lies a myth of subversive power, first fabricated in response to the French revolution. In 1797, two books appeared simultaneously. These were Abbé Barruel’s five-volume Mémoire pour servietterr à l’histoire du jacobinisme, and John Robison’s Proofs of a conspiracy against all the religions and governments of Europe, carried on in the secret meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati and Reading Societies. Both attributed the revolution to a centuries-old conspiracy of secret societies (from the Order of Templars to the Freemasons), responsible for an assault on religion and political authority. This theory of totalitarianism avanta la laettere is the template from which modern conspiracy narratives – from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the ‘New World Order’ – are cut. Conspiracy theory today, says Fredric Jameson, is an attempt to represent the ‘social totality’ at the level of fantasy in a way that evades ‘liberal an...

By Richard Seymour Disasters are supposed to pull us together. They are supposed to produce a wave of euphoria among survivors once the worst has passed, forging in the ruins a ‘city of comrades’. Rebecca Solnit shows us how disasters can spawn ‘disaster communities’ and even, by disrupting the ordinary misery and alienation of daily life, inflame utopian desires.  It isn’t necessarily so. A ‘city of comrades’ is only likely to appear in special circumstances, where the disaster doesn’t disperse the community, where the community was not already split along multiple faultlines (class, race, religion), where there were already traditions of self-help, mutualism and solidarity, and – in some instances – where the disaster is not inflicted by other human beings. What happens when the misery is ‘anthropogenic’, the resources for self-help are negligible, social trust is in the gutter, and the expected reflexes of decency and charity fail to materialise? In his work on disasters over se...

  There could be a happy world, where cooperation was more in evidence than competition, and monotonous work is done by benevolent and beneficent machines, where what is lovely in nature is not destroyed to make room for hideous machines whose sole business is to kill, and where to promote joy is more respected than to produce mountains of corpses. Do not say this is impossible: it is not. It waits only for men to desire it more than the infliction of pain. There is an artist imprisoned in each one of us. Let him loose to spread joy everywhere. — Bertrand Russell , Last Essay: 1967

Palestinians force to leave and Israeli settlers move in . This is a pattern being repeated in villages across the Jordan Valley in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. We're in Mu’arrajat, which until a week ago had a population of around 500 people.

I won't miss waiting for the next financial disaster because we haven't dealt with the underlying causes of the last one. Nor will I be disappointed not to experience the results of the proto-fascism that's rearing its grisly head right now. It's the utter idiocy, the sheer wrong-headedness of the response that beggars belief. I mean, your society's broken, so who should we blame? Should we blame the rich, powerful people who caused it? No let's blame the people with no power and no money and these immigrants who don't even have the vote, yeah it must be their fucking fault. So I might escape having to witness even greater catastrophe. — Iain Banks , Scottish author (1954-2013)

'Women were grabbed and dragged away like sacks' 

A new website, dedicated to research and data on inequality and core-periphery dynamics in the world-system

'Zionism and its destiny ’

July 4th  marks the 249th anniversary of the declaration of America's independence. This is no reason to celebrate. Let it instead serve as an opportunity to remind ourselves that the most pressing threat to humanity is a bloodthirsty pack of private interests hellbent on resource extraction and willing to use the full extent of its military might to destroy every living thing between it and capital accumulation.

Fuelling the machinery of genocide

Not really news, but good to see it on the BBC “The Yoorrook Justice Commission found violence and disease reduced the local Indigenous population by three quarters in the 20 years after the state was colonised, in the early 1830s.”

“Israel is not after solving its nuclear dilemma with Iran. It is after solving its Iran dilemma, which is that this state is too big, it’s too powerful, it’s too influential, it’s too capable .”

The world clearly constitutes a single system, i.e., a coherent whole, but the knowledge of this system presupposes knowledge of all nature and history, which man will never attain. Hence, he who makes systems must fill in the countless gaps with figments of his own imagination, i.e., engage in irrational fancies, ideologize.  —Frederick Engels, Anti-Dühring, 1969 [1877]

“The reasons for this devastation lie in structural factors shaping the country’s economy and demography , as well as the accumulated harms caused by decades of intermittent war. “The extreme underdevelopment in peripheral regions has logically bred grievances among local populations that, when combined with the central state’s violent suppression of dissent, creates fertile ground for the rise of armed groups. The atrocities committed by the RSF, SAF, and allied militias on both sides merely continue long-established patterns of violence.”

“On one hand, we have the symbolic violence of intellectual gatekeeping, where certain voices—usually elite, often Western—decide which suffering is legitimate and which resistance is ‘too Western’, ‘too liberal’, or ‘not authentic enough’. On the other, we have the remnants of Orientalism living on in reverse: an unwillingness to confront tyranny when it wears traditional clothes or speaks the language of anti-imperialism. “Bourdieu showed us how elites define what counts as legitimate knowledge. Said exposed how empire produces false knowledge in order to rule. But what neither could have fully foreseen is this third form: where knowledge cloaked in anti-imperialist jargon becomes a tool to delegitimize resistance .” Here is an example: Tariq Ali cannot being himself to go beyond 'geopolitics' to sociology . There is not a single mention of the Iranian society, power relations, repression, etc., and how all that is related to 'geopolitics'.