Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Putin is a war criminal – and so was Albright

This is a long radio interview, but it is worth listening to. (You should slide forward to minute 4:00) There is a good argument about why most Russians have been generally passive since the 1991 despite the disaster of the 1990s, and how consent has been gained.  However, it is not clear/elaborated why Russian capitalism remained weak and could not develop a strong competitive capitalist economy or why the Russian capitalist class did not embank on such a project.  Russia Beyond Putin by Tony Wood

Russia "A lot of the continuities I see are really more focused on the internal evolution of the system. I think that a lot of what people, certainly in the West, criticize Putin for certain kinds of authoritarian behavior, reining in the regions, control of the press, galloping corruption–all of these things were not only present under Yeltsin, but actually the foundations were laid during the Yeltsin years for what then developed under Putin. The clearest example I can think of this is the constitution. That was imposed after this slightly dodgy referendum in 1993. All of Putin’s presidential power derived from that moment where Yeltsin resolved the conflict with the Parliament by force. If you want to undo this contrast between Yeltsin, the democrat, and Putin the authoritarian, all you’ve got to do is look at that moment and then you understand that in that particular moment when a liberal, or someone committed to a liberal free market transformation of Russia, when Yelt

The prophet perverted

"Pension reforms delaying retirement brought outcry from Russians. But Putin keeps  squeezing lower incomes, exempting a wealthy elite close to the Kremlin." —Le Monde Diplomatique, November 2018

To Putin's leftist supporters, look how beautiful these two men look like and how alike they are!

Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has said in the aftermath of the 'Western' attack on Syria that "The US president, UK prime minister and the president of France are criminals." So are him, Bashar al-Assad and Putin. 

A good take on Putin's Russia with no mention of Syria.  A bit soft on the American-led political-economy of "inevitability".  "Americans and Europeans have been guided through our new century by what I will call  the politics of inevitability  – a sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing really to be done. In the American, capitalist version of this story, nature brought the market, which brought democracy, which brought happiness. In the European version, history brought the nation, which learned from war that peace was good, and hence chose integration and prosperity." "Vladimir Putin's politics of eternity"

After the Skripal attack