Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the 20th century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for [Arab, Indian and African peoples]. — Aimé Césaire  The bourgeoisie as a class and as an organized social force — one is not necessarily talking here about individuals — will always take the side of reaction against radical change under capitalism and will always stab the working class in the ba

An excellent article ‘Even when things were at their worst, the majority of Americans were free to say what they thought for the simple reason that they never thought what they were not free to say’. — the atomic physicist Leo Szilard The new orthodoxy

Nazism and socialism

  Why can’t Britain handle the truth about Winston Churchill?

"We formed an alliance with Stalin right at the end of the most murderous years of Stalinism, and then allied with a West German state a few years after the Holocaust. It was perhaps not surprising that in this intellectual environment a certain compromise position about the evils of Hitler and Stalin—that both, in effect, were worse—emerged and became the conventional wisdom." — Thimothy Snyder, a Professor of History at Yale, US. An interesting perspective. Stalin vs. Hitler: who was worse? Who killed more: Hitler, Stalin, or Mao?

The Real Winston Churchill

Assessing Trotsky

The Red Army was "the main engine of Nazism’s destruction,"  writes British historian and journalist Max Hastings in "Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945." The Soviet Union paid the harshest price: though the numbers are not exact, an estimated 26 million Soviet citizens died during World War II, including as many as 11 million soldiers. At the same time, the Germans  suffered three-quarters of their wartime losses  fighting the Red Army. "It was the Western Allies’ extreme good fortune that the Russians, and not themselves, paid almost the entire ‘butcher’s bill’ for [defeating Nazi Germany], accepting 95 per cent of the military casualties of the three major powers of the Grand Alliance," writes Hastings. Don't forget how the Soviet Union saved the world from Hitler (the Washington Post) Yes, that happened despite Stalin's crimes and blunders.

Every word in this article could be mine. Violence: theirs and ours See also this letter by Vijay to a Syrian written in Sep 2013 "The light that shines alone in palaces, Steals away the people’s happiness. Feigns its strength from other’s weakness. That kind of system, Dawn without light, I refuse. I deny."

From World War II to Vietnam and Syria, drugs are often as much a part of conflict as bombs and bullets

Hopping in his Matchbox