Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Rules of the game

“None of the chapters is a polemic. Rather, for the most part, the book constitutes a simple statement of bald facts of which many western readers will be shamefully ignorant .”

In social life there are  degrees   of power and degrees of falsity.   The more the masses of people adhere to truth, the less power-mongering there will be;  the more imbued with irrational illusions the masses of people are, the more widespread and brutal individual power-mongering will be. —Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism From the same source: Open avowal of dictatorship is much less dangerous than sham democracy. The first one can fight; sham democracy is insidious. It was one of the greatest errors in evaluating dictatorship to say that the dictator forces himself on society against its own will. In reality, every dictator in history was nothing but the accentuation of already existing state ideas which he had only to exaggerate in order to gain power.

A ‘group’ that “held an attachment to forms of hope that placed faith in the capitalist system to fulfil their dreams . “I develop a political economy of emotion and hope that traces how capitalist systems continue to capture the attention of the very people harmed by them.”  I would use ‘forms of the capitalist system’ rather than ‘capitalist systems’. There is only one globalised capitalist system, albeit with different form in different countries.

" Buy when there's blood in the streets,  even if the blood is your own . " —Baron Rothschild

   فيلسوف المثال والواقع السوري

The dish “is in the crosshairs of certain city dwellers who look upon shawarma vendors with a jaundiced eye, as forerunners of a foreign invasion. Their reactions speak volumes about the crises in the Middle East and their repercussions in Cairo, but also about regional geopolitics, migratory streams, the refugee problem, the economic crisis plaguing the country and the fervent nationalism which is surfacing again as a result. Shawarma “has become a symbol of xenophobia and rampant nationalism. ”