Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion […] but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” ―  Samuel P. Huntington ,  The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order , 1996, p. 51

"The interesting thing about Rojava is that while the YPG and YPJ are lauded worldwide for their struggle against the Islamic State, the fact remains that the solidarity shown for the Syrian Kurds is based on a notion of a common enemy rather than shared truths. While ISIS was globally understood in the terms of science fictional apocalypse, the city of Kobane became a metaphor for secularism, heroism, anti-terrorism and patriotism, all values assumed to prevent the arrival of the doomsday and behind which, the world, specifically the western world, would securely stand. Ironically however, the ideas that inspire what’s happening in Rojava developed from a critique of western paradigms of capitalism, positivism, individualism and professionalism. Therefore, it is urgent to become informed about the ideals of the Kurdish Liberation Movement and what it does on the ground so that now a larger support can be mobilized for it as it is dealing with Turkish attacks and its abandonment

Women's strike 08 March 2018

" A lot of truth in this . But there is a real problem with the tendency to see all this in terms of ‘turning away from western values’-as if fascism wasn’t a western value-as if justice was the sole possession of the west-as if movements for democracy were all about a desire to be western. In so many ways this whole discourse is part of the problem-people who have never expanded their universalism beyond a constricted eurocentric post-war vision. I do think we’re confronted by discursively similar discourses in this respect-both flowing out of an amazing theoretical laziness and ennui." — John Gamey Indeed, is Germany's complicity with Isreal in crimes a Western value or not? The decades long of Western states support of dictatorships in the Middle East, North Africa and elsewhere a Western value or not? Is the state of Europe today, including the consequences of neolibral capitalism, the rise of the far-right, corruption, relentless privatisation, curtailing unions

Carter told Brzezinski and secretary of state  Cyrus Vance  as early as January 1979 that it was vital to "repair our relationships with Pakistan" in light of the unrest in Iran.  One initiative Carter authorized to achieve this goal was a collaboration between the CIA and Pakistan's  Inter-Services Intelligence  (ISI); through the ISI, the CIA began providing some $500,000 worth of non-lethal assistance to the mujahideen on July 3, 1979—several months prior to the Soviet invasion. The modest scope of this early collaboration was likely influenced by the understanding, later recounted by CIA official  Robert Gates , "that a substantial U.S. covert aid program" might have "raise[d] the stakes" thereby causing "the Soviets to intervene more directly and vigorously than otherwise intended. That same Carter now considers the U.S. an oligarchy

Germany "The neoliberal bourgeoisie no longer acts according to the rules of classical Marxism. The CEOs of the DAX 30 companies will not suddenly arrive like Batman to save centrist politics. The economic elite is, after all, the client of the state – always dependent on handouts, outsourcing, deregulation and implicit subsidies. Both Trump and Brexit show: the corporate elite will take what it they are given – and they usually learn to like it. So the German left must outline a new long-term strategy . The first question is: what does it mean to be progressive in 21st century Germany? At a micro-level this is answered every day by the altruistic actions of young people and trade unionists: to do volunteer work with migrants and refugees; to attend democratic political and cultural events; to cycle and to recycle; to uphold the rights of women, ethnic minorities and gay people. To confront unflinchingly the memory of the Holocaust. To trace, as the Marxist philosopher Geo

The African anthropocene