Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

I think the figure is reasonable and could be higher as the BBC suggests.

Waiting for a good piece on the concert attack in Russia. A quick thought: If IS did carry out the attack, was it because it hated the ‘Russian way of life’ and ‘Russian values’? Russia is not run by a ‘Shi’a’ regime and ISIS-K has been killing ‘Sunnis’ in Afghanistan – bombing even mosques. Some liberal sometime provide clues : “ Michael Kugelman of the Washington-based Wilson Center said ISIS-K ‘sees Russia as being complicit in activities that regularly oppress Muslims’. He added that the group also counts as members a number of Central Asian militants with their own grievances against Moscow.” Think Afghanistan. Think Chechnya. Think Syria …and Russian involvement in other countries. Think Wagner.

“Far from being caused by personal rivalry, this conflict is rooted in the long history of the region and Sudan’s never-ending economic and social crisis. The conflict between the North and the South claimed between half a million and a million lives from 1955 to 2002. And herein lies the cause of the fighting tearing Sudan apart. To understand it requires going back to 2011. The secession of South Sudan and the rise of guerrilla movements within the North’s Muslim populations had weakened President Omar al-Bashir’s authority. His increasingly unpopular Islamist regime had been in power since the coup of June 1989 and was rotten with corruption. The regime sent the Janjaweed to fight in Yemen on behalf of the Saudis – who paid handsomely – and then tasked them with repressing the northern guerrillas of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N), first in Darfur and then throughout the country. From the day after the coup, there were obvious tensions between the two forces, e

A geopolitical summary and ‘forecasts’ “Rather than transforming the Middle East … the war may leave intact the ‘security architecture’ built by Trump and Biden. Yet the instability of this edifice has been proven. It would only be a matter of time before it buckles once again.” The US and the war on Gaza Illustrasjon: Knut Løvås, knutlvas@gmail.com

‘Israel has the right to defend itself against such heinous attacks,’ 

I don’t expect from Andrew Harding and the BBC’s international editor to add a bit of historical context, mainly the working of political economy of the 200 years that emerged in Western Europe then imposed on the rest of the world.  “ After all, Western nations have, for decades, devoted significant energy and cash towards supporting health services, businesses and governments across the continent.”  Putting aside the difference between nation and state and who really did what they did in particular contexts and conjunctures, the obvious is that why then Africa is still in a dire situation. The explanation, people like Harding would like us to put forward, is the same we have heard hundreds of times before: ‘It is their fault, those Africans’, ‘it is in their culture’, ‘they don’t know how to implement the right capitalism’… Harding would be more satisfied if he added NGOs, ‘aid’, ‘free market’, ‘human rights’, etc. Note also how in the title both China and Russia already have one uni

John Gray is considered an English philosopher.  According to the British journalist Francis Wheen, Gray “has published dozens of increasingly apocalyptic books and articles on the need to end the Enlightenment project forthwith.” Excerpts from ‘ The West yearns for Putin to fall. But what happens if the Russian state collapses?’ The New Statesman, July 28-August 17, 2023 “The West yearns for Putin to fall. But what happens if the Russian state collapses? If Ukrainian forces nonetheless fail to break through Russian positions, a frozen conflict becomes a realistic outcome. Western support is nearing exhaustion. Deindustrialised societies cannot sustain a protracted conflict when Russia is operating as a fully fledged war economy. The West is staking its endgame on regime change. What if that has the same result as it did in Iraq and Libya?” In the Russian Civil War of 1917-1921 “ Western military intervention involving British and other foreign troops exacerbated the bloodshed. As man

Boris Kagarlitsky

The point here is what ‘West’? The article itself does not mention a single major European state and its position. All is about the US vs. the rest. Related A shift in global power structures World Oil:  Contemporary transformations in ownership and control

Wagner Group's capabilities have been honed in Syria, Libya and elsewhere in Africa

Andrew Bacevich is a conservative critical of American ‘foreign policy’/imperialism. Note the absence of the political economic factors of the US involvement in supporting Ukraine. In fact, not a single economic factor is mentioned, which – even when the reader doesn’t believe in “democracy vs. autocracy” or “rules of internal order” rhetoric as Bacevich correctly highlights – is left wondering about the reasons of American involvement in the war.  Furthermore, he is treating the involvement as exclusively directed against Russia, excluding the main threat for Washington’s imperialist hegemony – China . “ In the present moment, however, Russia is anything but America’s principal global adversary,” Bacevich states. It is a narrow way of looking at the global geopolitics. There is no reference either to the domestic social factors in the US in influencing the state’s decisions in going to war. Quoting a critic of Bacevich, there has been a "very powerful, cross-class social constitu

“ The key to understanding ‘what Putin really wants’ is not cherry-picking obscure phrases from his speeches and articles that fit observers’ preconceived biases, but rather conducting a systematic analysis of the structurally determined material interests, political organisation, and ideological legitimation of the social class he represents.” Related Political capitalism of the US

I think capitalism in Russia would be more accurate than Russian capitalism. “The narrative emphasising how the hybrid nature of the Russian state – neoliberal regulatory and statist interventionist – led it down the path to war in Ukraine, offers a fragmented (and misleading) explanation of reality. The problem is that the ideological and political features of the state are interpreted as exercised for purposes outside of capitalist accumulation – be it nationalism, patriarchy, racism, homophobia – conceived as separate systems of oppression from class.” On expropriation and social reproduction Related On the war and on internationalism The Development of Capitalism in Russia 

Profiting from war

The United States, Russia and China, from Kosovo to Ukraine There is a preview here

The emergence of a ruling class?

Another spillover of a failed revolution, uneven development, marginalisation …and genuine democratic restructuring of society. The absence of prevalent and radical forces that are able to unite the nation and establish a fair distribution of wealth.. The complex character of such a situation in different parts of the world is the focus of Michael Mann’s The Dark Side of Democrac y. “Class conflict has always been important in the development of modern society.” A weak class conflict invites all sorts of other conflicts. It even lays the ground for ethnic conflicts and genocide.  Counter-revolutionary and reactionary forces and regional powers always have interests in playing a role in exploiting and redirecting conflicts.  Dirar has vowed to use weapons to liberate the Beja people , who are native to eastern Sudan, from “historical marginalisation” by governments in Khartoum.  Related Lessons from European history “I will argue that class struggle and its institutionalization—far more

“The aggressive transmutation of ruling regimes into warring garrison states presiding over competitive military industrial complexes has degenerated all these states into alien powers treating entire nations as their military bases.” The rise of Iran’s military-industrial complex

I would use the word "Russian imperialism" cautiously, though. The rest stands accurate in my view. Richard Seymour in 2015: An unabashed mobilisation of ancient colonial binaries, with Russian imperialism cast as the guardian of secular, modern, liberal civilization against a barbarian ISIS. Its author has stated the upshot of this perspective quite explicitly : "kill them all". Or, to put it another way, exterminate the brutes. One is reminded of peak Hitchens, and of the traditions of imperialist apologia that he more or less deliberately evoked. And one is impressed by how deep this goes in parts of the left. Of course, Russian imperialism is not defending secular liberalism; that's not how imperialism works. And its targets are demonstrably much broader than ISIS. Of course, the Assad dictatorship is much more steeped in blood than ISIS at this point. The colonial unconscious, even if it has no history, should be placed in historical context. In the afterma

“In the mainstream media Russia is a blank screen on which the West gazes transfixed at its own visions.” How the country ended up with Vladimir  Putin