Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The US national anthem is a celebration of slavery?

How accurate is this? " Backward economies can be 'modernized' more or less on their own, but this seems to require dictatorial regimes which will sweat out of a generation or two the primary accumulation of capital goods needed. Backward economies can also be modernized, perhaps more slowly, without dictatorial regimes, but this seems to require that they be greatly and intelligently helped by industrially advanced nations. There do not seem to be other alternatives" ( The Causes of World War III , 1958, p. 75).

So basically we are struck but epidemics. Two of these epidemics are narcissims and identity politics.

Etienne Balibar: laïcité or identity? and ... the lastest on the identity crap

Via Joey Husseini Ayoub Middle East Eye asked me to write an op-ed on what's become an all-too-familiar theme following some of the (ongoing) exchanges between the folks at The Electronic Intifada and folks active in the Syria solidarity movement. To be quite honest with you, I got tired of writing the same thing. I think this is the 3rd or 4th time I write this - in fact you can see it as an extension of my piece for Raseef22 رصيفــ22  - and I know people who have written more than I have - emphasizing especially the work of Leila Al Shami and, obviously, the folks over at الجمهورية al-Jumhuriya like Yassin Al Haj Saleh and Yassin Swehat, all of whom have done infinitely more than I have.  It's frustrating, but here's one more.  I added quotes by Jesse Williams given that so much of the power narrative is being dominated by Americans (as usual, making this even more annoying) in the hope that American comrades would be able to challenge the narrative from within

A Pakistani version of "Take Five"

" LF : You make the argument that we’ve been sold on this  idea that there’s just one kind of love: monogamous heterosexual love that makes a baby. MW :  Yeah. Kant has this goofy German definition of marriage where it’s a mutual contract for the reciprocal use of someone’s genitals. That exclusive-genital sexuality is great if it’s with the right person, but we focus on how much it sucks  not  to have that; we rarely talk about how often it also sucks. Like, marriages are often unhappy—the No. 1 source of harm to a woman is her intimate partner." Love in a Time of Capital

Nasīr al-Dīn Tūsī and evolution?

"How the refugee crisis became invisible"

Who Wants to Save Capitalism?

Headlines on foreignpolicy.com, 26 August 2016 "BAN THE BURQA?:  Eight in ten Germans favor banning the burqa in public spaces."  " THE BURKINI'S WILD RIDE:  A judge in France ruled that municipalities cannot ban women from wearing a certain kind of swimwear." Culturalization of social antagonisms, identity politics, etc .

Corruption and plunder in Britain: the example of Branson "What all this resembles is a looking-glass version of capitalism. The public are handing money to private businesses for them to take a clip and pay us back the rest. Just in case that wasn't ludicrous enough, remember that Virgin's parent company is listed in British Virgin Islands, a sunny tax haven that is a stop pretty far from Wigan. And as we've seen repeatedly with the east coast line, the ones who don't make a profit can simply walk away, dumping their service back in public hands. Heads they win, tails you lose. Branson is not the sole offender here; he's simply the most flamboyant representative of a completely rotten system for siphoning money from the public into private hands. The entire industry, as Treasury adviser Shriti Vadera put it in 2001, is peopled by  "thinly capitalised … profiteers of the worst kind" . And as a former investment banker, she'd know what those

Islam and Modernity: Can We be Muslims in the West? Islam et modernitë: peut-on être Musulmans en Occident? See also Feminists are failing Muslim women by supporting racist French laws

The Scientific Assassination of a Sexual Revolutionary: How America Interrupted Wilhelm Reich's Orgasmic Utopia

A Brief History of Scientology

"When, as happened recently in France, an attempt is made to coerce women out of the burka rather than creating a situation in which a woman can choose what she wishes to do, it’s not about liberating her but about unclothing her. It becomes an act of humiliation and cultural imperialism. Coercing a woman out of her burka is as bad as coercing her into one. It’s not about the burka. It’s about the coercion. Viewing gender in this way, shorn of social, political, and economic context, makes it an issue of identity, a battle of props and costumes. It’s what allowed the US government to use Western feminist liberal groups as moral cover when it invaded Afghanistan in 2001. Afghan women were (and are) in terrible trouble under the Taliban. But dropping daisy cutters on them was not going to solve the problem." — Arundhati Roy ( see extract from her book here )

Racism, Pure and Simple

Capitalism On productivity, growth, investment and profit

Egypt This is how a Chatham House fellow reminds us of Rabaa's massacre. No mention of the military and financial support of the Egyptian regime. No mention of the Muslim Brotherhood role in working with the regime and especially with the US and the SCAF from days one so that Mubarak goes, but the regime stays. And calling those criminals in the imperialist camp as "a democratic club" that Egypt is far from is just adding insult to injury.

This is generally a good summary, but I think the author is wrong on the class nature of Trump's supporters. The death of neoliberalism and the crisis in western politics