Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

"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