NM's blog

In his 1915 writing  May Day and the War , Lenin responded to the notion that war is just a "terrible" thing by highlighting that it is also " terribly profitable ".

An interview with Gilbert Achcar

That is my question to Google AI.  Answer: Erich Fromm's  Escape From Freedom  remains highly relevant because it explains how the psychological burden of autonomy leads people to embrace authoritarianism, conformity, and populism. His insights into modern loneliness, the loss of individual identity, and the surrender of free will accurately mirror contemporary societal crises .  The Core Mechanisms of Escape Fromm argued that while modern society gives us "freedom from" traditional constraints, it creates profound isolation and anxiety. To cope with this, individuals try to escape the burden of freedom in three ways that are highly visible today. Authoritarianism:  Submitting to strong leaders or adopting rigid ideologies to regain a sense of security and purpose. Automaton Conformity:  Blending entirely into the crowd or adopting the prevailing beliefs of one's culture to avoid standing out or taking personal responsibility. Destructiveness:  Pr...

No wonder why some people turn against asylum seekers and immigrants as a scapegoat in an advanced capitalist country. “The number of people on Sheppey who have a higher education level qualification, 16.8%, is half the England average. “ With dimmed prospects and little money , some are turning to crime. Criminal activity on Sheppey is twice the Kent average, with high levels of violent and sexual assaults. Shoplifting is also a problem. “Seashells family hub, which helps up to 400 children a week - some of whom struggle for a meal at home - had its funding cut by almost 90% in 2025 by Kent County Council.”

For those who always resign and blame 'human nature' whether it is the cause of wars, violence or obscene inequality and 'greed'. ************* A 2015 comprehensive meta-analysis of more than 2,500 twin studies between 1958 and 2012, covering almost 18,000 complex human traits, found (unsurprisingly) that identical twins are typically more similar than fraternal twins. But their personalities are certainly not identical. For the 568 traits that were descriptions of temperament or personality, the study found that 47% of differences could be attributed to genetic differences. The remaining portion, it concluded, must be accounted for by environmental influences. Other studies   seem to support this  – only around 40-50% of personality differences are genetic. But even when combining a range of different DNA variants, the effects on personality remain smaller than anticipated. Heritability estimates currently span  from 9% to 18%  for Big Five personalit...

The cultural and political crisis of our day is not due to the fact that there is too much individualism but that what we believe to be individualism has become an empty shell. The victory of freedom is possible only if democracy develops into a society in which the individual, his growth and happiness, is the aim and purpose of culture, in which life does not need any justification in success or anything else, and in which the individual is not subordinated to or manipulated by any power outside of himself, be it the State or the economic machine; finally, a society in which his conscience and ideals are not the internalization of external demands, but are really his and express the aims that result from the peculiarity of his self. These aims could not be fully realized in any previous period of modern history; they had to remain largely ideological aims, because the material basis for the development of genuine individualism was lacking. Capitalism has created this premise. The prob...

“A complex social field of millions of people is reduced to a symbolic reserve for regional politics.”  The image of Kurdistan “does not emerge from the real complexity of society. It is produced through selection, erasure, and compression. “Erasing class is necessary if a deeply uneven society is to be turned into a single unified body that others can speak for.”

I want to mention briefly some of the educational methods used today which in effect further discourage original thinking. One is the emphasis on knowledge of facts, or I should rather say on information. The pathetic superstition prevails that by knowing more and more facts one arrives at knowledge of reality. Hundreds of scattered and unrelated facts are dumped into the heads of students; their time and energy are taken up by learning more and more facts so that there is little left for thinking. To be sure, thinking without a knowledge of facts remains empty and fictitious; but “information” alone can be just as much of an obstacle to thinking as the lack of it. —Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom , 1941

Context: “California warehouse worker accused of arson raged online against capitalist greed.” (NBC News) The same day that Chamel Abdulkarim burned down his workplace, the president of the United States threatened to permanently annihilate “a whole civilization”—a statement which can only be described as a threat of genocide. “The people who carry the boxes, stock the shelves, scan the packages, and drive the routes know what Abdulkarim’s quote means. Not because they think arson is justified—they don’t. Because the sentence did not sound foreign. It sounded like something millions of people say in less catastrophic ways every day, in kitchens, in group chats, in cars outside warehouses before shifts they cannot afford to quit … Criminal acts deserve criminal consequences, full stop. But punishment does not answer the question underneath all of this, the one nobody in power addressed this week: what happens to the people who cannot afford to live in the economy being built above them?...

“ With the influx of Chinese automakers comes concerns that they don't respect Brazilian laws or unions. In China, there are no independent trade unions, they are all under the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, which is led by the ruling Communist Party of China. Independent trade unions in China are banned by the state and often face severe repression. ​“‘The majority of Chinese companies have not had contact with the Brazilian trade union movement,’”says Torres. “​In December of 2024, while plant expansion was underway, the Brazilian Ministry of Labor and Employment conducted a surprise inspection of the facility housing 163 Chinese workers who had been shipped to work at BYD. They found that workers lived in slave-like conditions on BYD’s factory grounds.” “The Brazilian Ministry of Labor and Employment charged BYD with 'slavery' and human trafficking, and concluded that living conditions were ‘a manifest affront to the principles of the dignity of human beings.’ “A...

The Conflict Insights Group has been closely following evidence of extensive Emirati military assistance to the RSF , but "this is the first research where we can prove UAE involvement with certainty", says director Justin Lynch. Related Counterrevolution, gold and global impunity UAE 2024

Excerpts from an article by Adam Hanieh on the FT “The new high-yielding varieties of the Green Revolution, by contrast, could only deliver their promised output through large and repeated applications of industrial fertilisers, especially nitrogen-based products such as urea and ammonium nitrate. Since many of these fertilisers are derived from natural gas, the Green Revolution meant that the world’s food production became ever more closely tied to a constantly increasing supply of hydrocarbon inputs.  “Doubts have long been expressed about the sustainability of this fossil fuel-based food system. But as oil and gas prices have risen steeply amid the US-Israeli war on Iran and a significant part of the global fertiliser trade has been brought to a standstill, its potential vulnerabilities have been made clear. “The current moment differs from those earlier crises in one crucial respect. During the past two decades, Gulf monarchies such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Em...

Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West

A very good piece by Eyal Weizman .  I first knew Weizman when I read his 2007 book Hollow Land . Weizman is director of  Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London “The circular logic of Zionist settler-colonialism: settlements are built to mark and protect the state’s border, but that makes them vulnerable to attack and so a buffer zone is established to protect them. Afterwards, this buffer zone is itself settled to mark and protect the newly expanded borders, at which point another buffer zone becomes necessary. In this manner vulnerability is produced and then mobilised in a feedback loop that the genocide scholar A. Dirk Moses has called ‘permanent security’. “The image of luxury towers constructed above mass graves, with tens of thousands presumably buried under the earthworks, embodies the logic of 21 st -century genocide. The Israeli government now hopes, in the words of the former minister Ron Dermer, that what ‘two years of war did not accomplish will...

Reading on screens or on paper

“Iran is not a country defined under NATO’s security umbrella, not an economy absorbed into a single bloc, and not a state whose path in a moment of crisis can be determined by the order of one foreign power. But at the same time…Iran does not have the economic power of China or the United States, their global alliance networks, or their institutional power to shape the rules of the world order.” It is “a regional power in an in-between place, trying to preserve a degree of independence without being able to become a global hegemon. “The US-Israeli attack and Iran’s response revealed this in-between position more clearly than anything else.”

Look who is the biggest threat to the UK. An elderly woman was manhandled by officers yesterday [13 April] because she was unable to walk quickly enough or far enough following her arrest under the UK Terrorism Act. Onlookers pleaded to the police to “leave her be” as they witnessed the insanity of arresting her. Over 500 people were arrested under the Terrorism Act at this single event, bringing the total arrests under the Lift The Ban campaign to well over 3,000 since July. Raj Chada, Head of Criminal Defence at leading law firm Hodge Jones and Allen, has confirmed: “The most common terrorist in the UK at present is a pensioner at a silent vigil holding a placard. That should be a matter of shame for the UK authorities.”

The term “ is being picked up again now to justify the latest western onslaught in the Middle East .” 

“More on the crisis of liberal expertise. This exchange over Yuri Slezkine's review on the "Western civilization" is a good illustration of how some scholars of Ukraine have managed to miss not only what has happened in the world since 2022 — saying without irony that the West offers an alternative to Russian barbarism in Ukraine, after Gaza and Iran, is simply nauseating — but also the developments within Ukraine itself (or perhaps still strategically obfuscating them). Slezkine's response at the end, on why Ukraine is an ethnonationalist state, is very strong.” —Volodymyr Eshchenko’s comment on Why ‘the West’?

‘Power without a throne’ There is mention, for example, of  Macron's government support of Haftar .