Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

"In school, boys who play war games with model soldiers aren’t viewed with suspicion by their teachers, whereas boys who carry knives into the playground are likely to be reported to the police. This may be wise, but the boys with knives understand something about war that the boys with model soldiers don’t: war is an intimate business. Some of the nastiest things happen close up, between individuals. Sometimes they don’t involve weapons. At dinner parties, journalists back from war zones are occasionally asked what it was really like. Perhaps the most accurate answer would be to rape the hostess, murder the host, cut the children’s throats and set fire to the house, without any explanation. There is much talk of war crimes, as if all war was not a crime." Nuremburg rally, invasion of Poland, Dunkirk

On capitalism, class and race Does David Roediger disagree with Ellen Meiksins Wood?

Forgetting Fanon, remembering Fanon

Towards the end of the British Empire, the British ruling class suddenly became humane. How Britain supported the early release of Rudolf Hess

The chemical attack at Khan Sheikoun

"It imperative that loyalty to a state be secured, and the nation is the means. Workers have often been asked to accept rises in interest rates, cuts in wages and services, or participation in imperialist wars, but never for the benefit of capitalism, always for the benefit of a particular nation, for “the national interest”. It is not only the state which makes such appeals. The organisations of the working class themselves reinforce reformist class consciousness within a national context. At the most elementary level this is because such organisations are unwilling to challenge the nationalism within which political discourse is conducted, for fear of being labelled unpatriotic. More importantly, however, it is because they seek either to influence or determine policy within the confines of the existing nation-state. Typically, therefore, nationalism is invested with the contradictory character of the reformist world view." The National Question, Class and the European U

“A lot has changed in the past 300 years,” Captain Picard explains to a cryogenically unfrozen businessman from the 20th century in an episode of a later “Star Trek” franchise, “The Next Generation.” “People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We’ve eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions. We’ve grown out of our infancy.” In The New York Times 'Star-Treck" and its debt to revolutionary socialism