Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

" Assad and his wife have a remarkably similar background to many elite figures in the West . Like Libya's Gaddafi dynasty, the House of Assad has strong connections to the United Kingdom. Bashar was studying ophthalmology in London when his brother Bassel dashed his chances of becoming president by smashing his Mercedes into a roundabout at 80mph. His wife, Asma, is British-Syrian, went to a private school, studied at King’s College, London and spent time working as a banker before becoming First Lady. The regime has sought to capitalise on Asma and build up an image for her as a sort of Syrian Princess Diana, including through her involvement in charity work. Her philanthropy, alas, does not extend to asking her husband to stop gassing Syria's civilians. Even the regime's poisonous propagandist, Bouthaina Shaaban, was educated at the University of Warwick, and the language she uses in interviews with western media outlets suggests the extent to which she unde

A great Syrian writer and critic has passed away.  If you haven't read this piece of his, you should do so. Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse He is also the author of the famous book (available in Arabic and English) Critique of Religious Thought A talk at LSE On Syria " The co ntradiction here is not in myposition , but in the position of those who once stood in support of the revolution of the Iranian people or the Liberation Theologists and their churches or for movements of national liberation almost everywhere, yet refuse to support the revolution of the Syrian people under the pretext that its demonstrations and protests spring from the mosque and not from the opera house or the national theatre, as Adonis justifies."  

"[T]he loss of US manufacturing jobs, as it has been in other advanced capitalist economies, is not due to nasty foreigners fixing trade deals.  It is due to the inexorable attempt of American capital to reduce its labour costs through mechanisation or through finding new cheap labour areas overseas to produce.  The rising inequality in incomes is a product of ‘capital-bias’ in capitalist accumulation and ‘globalisation’ aimed at counteracting falling profitability in the advanced capitalist economies. But it is also the result of ''neo-liberal'policies designed to hold down wages and boost profit share.  Trump cannot and won’t reverse that with all his bluster because to do so would threaten the profitability of America capital." Trump, trade and technology

Walls The Berlin Wall made the news every day. From morning till night we read, saw, heard: the Wall of Shame, the Wall of Infamy, the Iron Curtain... In the end, a wall which deserved to fall fell. But other walls sprouted and continue sprouting across the world. Though they are much larger than the one in Berlin, we rarely hear of them. Little is said about the wall the United States is building along the Mexican border, and less is said about the barbed-wire barriers surrounding the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla on the African coast. Practically nothing is said about the West Bank Wall, which perpetuates the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and will be 15 times longer than the Berlin Wall. And nothing, nothing at all, is said about the Morocco Wall, which perpetuates the seizure of the Saharan homeland by the kingdom of Morocco, and is 60 times the length of the Berlin Wall. Why are some walls so loud and others mute? — Eduardo Galeano, Mirrors

Greece has become the world's most corrupt country. In a complete ungrateful move to the benevolent "international creditors", the Greek prime minister announced a one-off Christmas bonus for 1.6 million low-income pensioners.

"The world’s refugee crisis, with its 65 million people on the move, more than at any time since 1945, knows no more sustained, sinister or surreal exercise in cruelty than the South Pacific quasi-prisons Australia has established for its trickle of the migrant flood ." (the NYT)

The spectacle consists of daily photographs and news items from a ten-time Guernica, Aleppo;  terrorist attacks in France, Egypt and Istanbul; countless refugees drowning in the sea; decades of a form of capitalism which have spawned more social dislocation, racism, Islamophobia, and far-right chauvinism, and more yet to come; Jennifer Lawrence's butt-scratching, which upset some viewers yearning for a merry Christmas.

Putting the hammer down on Cuba

The British government " relies on supine acquiescence to just about everything." England's Southern rails

Operation Carlota Gabriel García Márquez

The 'Heil Trump' Nazi Spencer had a debate with a Hillel rabbi , Rosenberg. Rosenberg tried to wash Spencer with the 'love and inclusion' which is sup posedly what 'Judaism teaches'.  “My tradition a teaches a message of radical inclusion and love,” Rosenberg said. “Will you sit down and learn Torah with me, and learn love?” Spencer declined the invitation, but offered a rejoinder in which he suggested that the objectives of Zionism and Jewish continuity were close to his own goals for white people. “Do you really want radical inclusion into the State of Israel?” Spencer said. “And by that I mean radical inclusion. Maybe all of the Middle East could go move in to Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. Would you really want that?” Rosenberg was silent. “You’re not answering,” Spencer said. “I’m not answering,” Rosenberg said. Spencer went on to argue that Jewish continuity is predicated on resistance to assimilation. “Jews exist precisely because you did not a

The hypocrisy of it. Just a week or two ago a leader columnist of the FT was defending " free market democracy " against Wolfgang Streeke's criticism.  Anyway, people are indifferent to this and are accepting the status quo. Even the far-right support is not coming from this aspect in the system.

الاضراب القانوني الذي تعتمده النقابات فيتم إعلام السلط به من خلال برقية قبل عشرة أيام، وتسبقه حتميا "جلسات صلحية" هو في الحقيقة الشكل النظامي للتحكم في حركة الشغيلة وضبطها، ومن جهة أخرى فهو طريقة لاستيعاب التمردات وحالة الغضب والتنفيس عنها بجرعات محسوبة ليتحول الاضراب، من شكل نضالي، الى حلقة من حلقات التفاوض بين السلطة والنقابة التي تكون قد أستولت لا على قرار الاضراب بل على امكانية تنفيذه، وهكذا يفقد الاضراب محتواه الحقيقي ويتحول الى مجرد تنفيذ لقرارات فوقية يتم الاعلان عنها  كما يتم سحبها من هياكل هي في الغالب مجهولة من أوسع جمهور العمال والموظفين الاداريين. الاضراب العشوائي، أو ما تسميه البورجوازية "الاضراب الوحشي" (وهو بالفعل وحشي وخطير)، هو ذلك الاضراب الذي يندفع اليه العمال في شكل جماعي وبروح نضالية عالية، فيتم تقريره وتنفيذه في نفس الوقت وبشكل فجائي وبمشاركة أغلبية العمال قرارا وتنفيذا، وبدل التفاوض يتم رفع المطالبات المحددة. وفي الغالب تتسم مثل هذه الاضرابات بطابع عنيف ومصادمات مع الأعراف أو مع قوات البوليس. قد يحقق الاضراب القانوني مكاسب أكبر من الاضر

"Prospective imperialists can turn to his  authorized biographer  Niall Ferguson for answers. Harvard’s specialist in restoring the devil’s reputation — having done so previously for the  House of Rothschild  and the  British  and  American  empires —  argues  that if we weigh the good (the United States winning the Cold War) against the bad (the “loss of life in strategically marginal countries”), Kissinger comes out a hero. Fortunately, those of us unwilling to perform that calculus have Greg Grandin’s  Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman .  The book avoids the trap of simply enumerating Kissinger’s crimes and actually takes its subject’s worldview seriously. Since the actual trial of Kissinger will never happen and the intellectual trial has  already  taken place, Grandin follows a different path: he traces how Kissinger’s ideas have come to dominate American foreign policy over the past fifty years. Using Kissinger as his protagon

The wrong kind of Universal Basic Income

"[T]he  aspiration of fractions of the Islamic bourgeoisie to strengthen their positions in the power structure, or rather to modify the place they occupy within the confessional political system, in order to better share the hegemony and not to change the system . . . This solution is not actually a solution; it will lead only to a worsening of the crisis of the system." — Mehdi Amel Hezbollah and the Workers

  Nationalism "in any imperialist society is bound up with chauvinism, and Britain is an imperialist society, with England its historical core, which has always been defined by its status in the imperialist hierarchy, whatever William Hague says to the contrary.  Orwell’s efforts to situate the basis for socialism on the terrain of culture and “ Englishness ,” which admittedly had a certain proto-Gramscian quality in its approach to popular culture as a strategic factor in political struggles, surely represent the last serious attempt to articulate something like a left-wing “Englishness.”  It was certainly light years ahead of the mawkish, demagogic detritus that passes for the same attempt these days.  Yet it failed rather badly, for two reasons.  First, because it misjudged the class basis for any post-war socialism, estimating that the perpetual growth of a functionary and technician class would be the basis for a rational yet national post-capitalist system.  This isn’t how

"The Syrians who are fighting their state are indefensible. Too bearded to be trusted, fratricidal on top of that, they are defying the laws of geopolitics in the Middle East, and could very well provoke World War III. Syrians, then, must not be defended. But what can be done faced with the spectacle of indignity streamed almost live from Syria since 2011? This spectacle is unprecedented. Never before in history has a crime against humanity been filmed day by day, turned int o a spectacle with the cooperation of both victims and executioners, broadcast by the big television networks and streamed on social media, intercut with ad breaks, consumed by the general public, and commodified by the art market. At the time of Auschwitz, only God was supposed to see what happened in the showers. It was only after the liberation of the camps that accredited filmmakers could capture evidence of the crimes, which were recognized as such by the legal authorities. Those images, however, were co

The long depression and Marx’s law – a reply to Pete Green

Syria: the ground zero for a new world order

The cleaners at the London School of Economics Compare here: The CEO of Lloyds Bank got £6,000 per hour in 2014, dividents and bonuses included. That is calculated on the basis that he worked 40 hours per week.  Suppose a cleaner in London gets £21000 per year. It takes Cristiano Ronaldo 11 minutes to earn what a cleaner earns in a week.

The Long Depression in Italy

"Between the onset of the global Cold War in 1948 and its conclusion in 1990, the US government secured the overthrow of at least twenty-four governments in Latin America, four by direct use of US military forces, three by means of CIA-managed revolts or assassination, and seventeen by encouraging local military and political forces to intervene without direct US participation, usually through m ilitary coups d’état . . . The human cost of this effort was immense. Between 1960, by which time the Soviets had dismantled Stalin’s gulags, and the Soviet collapse in 1990, the numbers of political prisoners, torture victims, and executions of nonviolent political dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded those in the Soviet Union and its East European satellites. In other words, from 1960 to 1990, the Soviet bloc as a whole was less repressive, measured in terms of human victims, than many individual Latin American countries. The hot Cold War in Central America produced an unprecede

The Middle East and North Africa

"About 90,000 people have signed a petition calling for tallow to be removed from bank notes." (BBC website).  But Churchill should remain on the five-pound note and in Parliament Square! " I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion ." — Winston Churchill

إدواردو غاليانو عن فيدال كاسترو

A clarification by Richard Seymour " When a wing of the left criticises "identity politics", they usually mean the kind of politics that reduces oppression to representation and that, as such, is apt to celebrate the inclusion of a right-wing fundamentalist woman in Trump's team because she is a woman and hence "diversification". They want a more substantive attack on racism, sexism, oppression of all kinds. When a wing of the liberal centre criticises "identity politics", they usually m ean to criticise what they think of as the overly clamorous and over-hasty demands of women, gays, African Americans, migrants and others for justice. This, they claim, puts 'progressives' in a difficult position when it comes to building coalitions (with racists, homophobes, etc) and achieving real reforms. When the Right attacks "identity politics", they mean any concession whatsoever to the idea that anyone other than white bourgeois me

The following questions were asked in 1978: "With what moral right can the rulers of a nation speak of human rights when within it the millionaire and the beggar coexist, the Indian is exterminated, the black man is discriminated against, women are prostituted and large masses of Chicano, Puerto Ricans and Latin Americans are scorned, exploited and humiliated?  How can this be done by the rulers of a nation where the Mafia, gambling and child prostitution predominate, where the CIA organizes subversion and universal esp ionage plans and where the Pentagon creates neutron bombs capable of preserving material assets while exterminating human beings, in an empire that supports reaction and counterrevolution throughout the world, that protects and encourages the exploitation by monopolies of the wealth and human resources on all continents, unequal trade, a protectionist policy, an incredible squandering of natural resources and a system of hunger for the world?  How can this be don

Turkey Torture in the wake of the failed coup 1. If the coup succeeded, I think, the military would have done as much or probably more. 2. Now even the progressive opposition in Turkey is being subjected to brutal repression. 3. The main Western powers were late in condemning the coup. Russia and Iran, for their own strategical interests, were among the first to come against the coup. That was one of the elements which drove Erdogan to heal Turkey's relations with Russia.

France BBC website: Mr Fillon is " proposing dramatic economic reforms that include slashing 500,000 public jobs, ending the 35-hour week, raising the retirement age and scrapping the wealth tax. On foreign policy, he advocates closer relations with Russia." It sounds great! Probably 40% of the electorate will vote for that.

The heroic tale of great entrepreneurs is nonsense

Revolutionary icon finally defeated by infirmity of old age

The Godfather: meeting of human roth

Arab Studies Journal

" Once debts have been subtracted, a person needs only $3,650 to be among the wealthiest half of the world’s citizens. However, about $77,000 is required to be a member of the top 10% of global wealth holders and $798,000 to belong to the top 1%.  So if you own a home in any major city in the rich North on your own and without a mortgage, you are part of the top 1%.  Do you feel rich if you do?  This just shows how poor the vast majority of people in the world are: with no property, no cash and certainly no stocks and bonds!" The vast majority? They are just losers; the are uneducated, they don't know how to be entrepreneurs .. . New figure reached by annual Credit Suisse global wealth report

Why Do White-Working Class People Vote against Their Interests?  They Don't.

Unexpected Cuba L'origines structurelles de la dictature bureaucratique Fidel Castro dies at 90, leaving lasting legacy in the Middle East Havana, Trinidad, Cientfuegos: Photos from my flickr

Class in more intersectional than intersectionality

"Hebron, the Occupation's Factory of Hate"

London " Graham recounts how Mohamed Atta, a leader of the World Trade Center attack, was for years before 9/11 a ferocious critic of high-rises. A holder of degrees in both architecture and urban planning, he regarded such buildings as destructive of cities’ ancient virtues – as do many conservationists and urban activists, and as, in some ways, does Graham himself."

Scrap art schools, privatise cities, and bin social housing

There is no such a thing as Western civilisation

The imperialist criminal blockade against Cuba will continue

Understanding Climate Justice in Morocco's Perepheries

'Extreme surveillance' becomes UK law with barely a whimper

"As we know, Trump supporters tend to be white, tend to be older, tend to be male, tend to live in households with slightly higher income, and tend to have less education. Interestingly, his base is also significantly more likely to be self-employed overall, among other whites, and among other Republicans. In key respects, Trump represents the revenge of Joe the Plumber — and indeed Joe supports him. Many feel more comfortable casting his bid as some abhorrent anomaly. But Trumpism is no oddity. Instead it’s the expression of the anxieties of the petit bourgeoisie and a result of a break between two wings of the capitalist class in the Republican Party that began with the emergence of the Tea Party." The Revenge of Joe the Plumber

Neo-Liberalism and the Far-Right: a Contradictory Embrace

"Before Donald Trump was elected, stock markets went down every time he improved in the public opinion polls.  Finance capital did not want him to win.  But since his surprise election, stock markets have not slumped.  On the contrary, they have risen substantially along with a strengthening dollar.  It seems that ‘the Donald’ could be a good thing for Capital after all." Testing Trumponomics

" Trump and Berlusconi are both men who came to power from business rather than politics, and both have presented their inexperience with the political establishment as a mark of purity. They have both insisted on their entrepreneurial success as the most evident proof of their qualification to rule the country. Like Plato’s tyrant, they both exhibit an ethos based on a dream of continuous and unlimited jouissance and an aggressive and hubristic eros (though Berlusconi prefers to think of himself as an irresistible seducer rather than a rapist). They both indulge in gross misogynistic and racist jokes and have reshaped public language by legitimizing insult and political incorrectness as acceptable forms of political communication and by embodying an exhilarating return of the repressed. They both revel in kitschy aesthetics and don the orange hue of artificial tanning. And they both allied with the far right in order to advance a political project of authoritarian neoliberal

Education in Britain (source:  bbc ) But researchers highlight some other questions muddying the waters. Students do not enter university unshaped by what went before.  How much of higher earnings in later life might be linked to coming from high-income parents, rather than anything to do with higher education? A key finding of the income research was that graduates from wealthy families ended up earning more than than those from poorer families, even if they studied the same course at the same university. But there is no escaping the growing sense of stratification in the university sector and differences in status. Belonging to the Russell Group [i.e. elite universities] has become a kind of self-conferred status symbol for its membership.