Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Britain Brexit: Stay or Leave? Children Abused "on an Industrial Scale"

British imperialism's realism "Assad and rebels should join forces against IS: UK parliamentary committee"

Eros and Civilization for a Jobless Future: Herbert Marcuse and the Abolition of Work " Surplus-repression and the performance principle compel people to internalize the constant drive to work, compete, and produce. They are also evident in the vehement hostility directed against individuals who refuse to work, appear to be lazy or unproductive, or seem generally free of social constraint. Surplus-repression and the performance principle are most apparent in conservative attacks on the welfare state, and they are well known to protesters who have been yelled at by passersby to “GET A JOB!” Social anxieties about pleasure and freedom proliferate, demanding submission to authoritarian forces of repression: “As the reality principle takes root, even in its most primitive and most brutally enforced form, the pleasure principle becomes something frightful and terrifying; the impulses for free gratification meet with anxiety, and this anxiety calls for protection against them” (Marc

" This is the country where toddlers shoot their mothers and the police wage a murderous war against black Americans. This is the country  that has attacked and sought to overthrow more than 50 governments, many of them democracies, and bombed from Asia to the Middle East, causing the deaths and dispossession of millions of people.  No country can equal this systemic record of violence. Most of America's wars (almost all of them against defenseless countries) have been launched not by Republican presidents but by liberal Democrats: Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama." In 1947, a series of National Security Council directives described the paramount aim of American foreign policy as a world substantially made over in America's own image. The ideology was messianic Americanism. We were all Americans. Or else. Heretics would be converted, subverted, bribed, smeared or crushed. Donald Trump is a symptom of this, but he is also a maverick. He says the i

Scenario for a Wonderful Tomorrow What  about Europe? And why dwell so long on the refugee crisis when I’m supposed to be discussing a book on the euro crisis? The answer is that Merkel’s immigration policy offers an object lesson in what other countries can expect from Germany acting European. Just as the United States sees the world as an extended playing field for its domestic political economy, Germany has come to consider the European Union as an extension of itself, where what is right for Germany is by definition right for all others. There is nothing particularly immoral about this; indeed Germans think it is supremely moral, as they identify their control of Europe with a post-nationalism understood as anti-nationalism, which in turn is understood as the quintessential lesson of German history. Very much like the US, German elites project what they collectively regard as self-evident, natural and reasonable onto  their  outside world, and are puzzled that anyone could po

A headline on foreignpolicy.com " THE ROTTEN HEART OF EUROPE:   Belgium’s political dysfunction and economic marginalization of Muslim communities put us all in danger, FP’s Leela Jacinto writes." What a surprise! " But while Europe offered the sort of economic opportunities for which the 1960s generation of migrants was grateful, their children have been not so lucky. The economic downturn since the late 1970s saw the closure of Belgian coal mines and heavy industries, leaving areas of urban blight. Belgium’s national unemployment rate, hovering around 8 percent, climbs to   more than 20 percent among the youth population . Among Belgians of Moroccan or Turkish origin, that figure can double to around 40 percent. Add high unemployment to the mix of poor policing, fuddled administration and services, and you have the perfect breeding grounds for marginalization and radicalization. Tiny Belgium today has the dubious distinction of being the country with the highe

Here’s What a Man Who Studied Every Suicide Attack in the World Says About ISIS’ Motives This is a partial take on the issue... One needs to delve into the cities and neighbourhoods ( see, for example the study on Jihadism in Daouar Hicher in Tunis) to identify sociological and psychological motives. In addition, there is a bigger picture: local and Western state terrorism, repression, economic and financial terrorism by local and international agents, decades of marginalizations and humuliation...