NM's blog

From an interview with a former U.S special forces green beret

Zambia's 'black mountains'

 by Atalia Omer

The writer and activist of the Israeli pacifist left  David Grossman on the war in Gaza: "Now, with immense pain and a broken heart, I must acknowledge what is happening before my eyes — a genocide."

Shahid Bolsen   Yanis Varoufakis   Jeffrey Sachs John Mearsheimer   Walid Khalidi in 2009 Noam Chomsky in 2009 Noam Chomsky in 2006 or 2008 James Baldwin in 1979

"The image of the Gaza child consumed by hunger casts a harsh light on the ethnic cleansing carried out by the Netanyahu government. It has triggered global awareness. A first step toward ending Israel's impunity?" I think not. Israel has been / will be defeated politically, but sooner or later, there will be an end to the 'war', a new Israeli government and the 'Israeli state' will be salvaged by internal and external powers. Any Palestinain state will be a non-viable state depended on some Western powers, even without US approval, and on Israel and the Arab regimes. 

Resistance doesn’t follow electoral cycles or await the results of public opinion polls. Those who resist occupation do not ask whether their defiance is “appropriate” or “palatable”. That question itself reflects a deep ethical confusion — one that equates a subjugated people with the very power that oppresses them .

“Investigation finds one of Britain’s oldest and most prestigious universities benefited from transatlantic slavery and was haven for white supremacist theories .”

 We often have difficulty discerning truth not because we have no desire for truth, but because there are desires other than the desire to know. These include the desires for prestige, power, material possessions, and material comfort. Such desires can prevent us from discerning that truth which lies behind and beyond individual and collective interest. —Charles McKelvey, Beyond Ethnocentrism, 1991

“The final report of the Water Commission includes this calculation: “We estimate that over £85 billion has been extracted from the English water system by shareholders and affiliated parties since privatisation.” Given the parlous, creaking, under-invested condition of Britain’s…”

The dark art of spinning a war

Review of  Un Historien à Gaza: Un témoignage de première main  

and the British government sowed the seeds of civil war

By Richard Seymour QAnon is more than a global phenomenon of recreational conspiracism. It has not only recruited millions of believers, but utterly upended their lives, alienated them from their families and induced dreams of gory civil war. As a recanting QAnoner put it, from the inside it looked as if ‘everyone else was living in a dream world’. QAnon is a conversion-machine designed by no single hand, turning agnostic thrill-seekers into devotees of the apocalypse, transforming the ideological debris of conspiracism into a cohesive authoritarian subculture and translating the attentional surges thereby generated into profit for far-right entrepreneurs. As QAnon expanded, it drew the attention of an emerging ‘alt-tech’ scene, eager to secede from the tech giants that had capitulated to the ‘woke’ and capitalise on the demand for a stigmatised form of right-wing socialising. Launched in September 2018 with investment from the billionaire Mercer family and the millionaire YouTuber and...

Twelve years after 2013 coup

A report from Miami, Florida

Brexit and myths of Englishness

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore— And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over— like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode? —Langston Hughes, “Harlem: A Dream Deferred”

“ Haji Agha  is not merely the name of a fictional character —it is a title that embodies a social type deeply rooted in Iran’s historical class structure…  a kind of historical alliance emerges between religion,  the bazaar , violence, and the state apparatus, whose goal is to suppress public awareness, preserve class hierarchy, and sustain exploitation.”