Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

An excellent piece

Western values.

“ [A] capitalist social system is not only property relations ; it is also a set of unspoken values common to the society. These values are stronger than any army and they are the main force maintaining capitalism today.”

Reality and perspectives after Trump has announced lifting the sactions

I watched Papillon. A fantastic movie. “The penal colony was the setting of French writer Henri Charrière's book Papillon, which was later made into a Hollywood film starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman.” A high security prison in Amazon jungle

At last, the time has come in which all that human beings had considered as inalienable has become the object of exchange, of traffic, and may be alienated. It is a time when the very things which before were conveyed, but never bartered; given, but never sold; conquered, but never purchased — virtue, love, opinion, science, conscience etc. — when, in short, everything has finally become tradable. It is a time of generalized corruption, universal venality or, to speak in terms of political economy, the time when anything, moral or physical, receives a venal value, and may be taken to market to be appraised for its appropriate value. —Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy , 1847

From a long investigative report “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 marked Europe’s single-biggest weapons procurement rush since the second world war. While Ukraine’s Nato allies delivered vast amounts of military aid, the country’s own officials were also forced to find ways to supply troops fighting across a 1,000-kilometre front line. A Financial Times investigation, based on leaked Ukrainian state documents, court filings and dozens of interviews with procurement officials, weapons dealers and manufacturers, and detectives, has uncovered how hundreds of millions of dollars Kyiv paid to foreign arms intermediaries to secure vital military equipment has gone to waste over the past three years of war. “As Ukraine continues to battle against Russia’s ammunition production superiority, the country has been left exposed to the ruthless vagaries of the international weapons market. In several cases Kyiv paid out large amounts in advance to little-known companies for materiel that to t...

Road to October 7

The latest of 'our values' “Giving their accounts publicly for the first time, the veterans described seeing members of the SAS murder unarmed people in their sleep and execute handcuffed detainees, including children. “The new testimony includes allegations of war crimes stretching over more than a decade, far longer than the three years currently being examined by a judge-led public inquiry in the UK.” “[L]aws state that on such operations people can be deliberately killed only when they pose a direct threat to the lives of British troops or others.”  “They pose direct threat.” Where? Was Afghanistan at the time in the North Sea or part of UK territories? And is this really separate from funding the killing of children and women in Gaza? The cover up: “ The testimony, as well as new video evidence obtained by the BBC from SAS operations in Iraq in 2006, also supports previous reporting by Panorama that SAS squadrons kept count of their kills to compete with one another.” And ...

“In recent years, several state-owned Chinese companies, along with other private Chinese firms,  have invested  directly or indirectly in Israeli settlements or companies operating within them. “ China’s actions directly contradict the legal principles it claims to uphold .”

“If you’re a Zionist, you do not get to claim solidarity with Gaza. If you oppose abortion, you have not sided with feminism. If you’re a far-right Christian who loves gay people but 'hates the sin', you’re lying to yourself and everyone around you. If you write a muddled piece about the conceptual importance of 'biological women' days after a ruling that erases trans people from public life, you don’t support trans liberation—hell, you don’t even support trans survival. Claiming support while advocating destruction is not solidarity ; it is self-serving manipulation. It is covert bullying. It is demanding, in dulcet tones, that oppressed people pat you on the back while you slit their throats.”

“If MSF [ Médecins Sans Frontières]  secured the neocolonial bridgehead, it was British academics, such as Randolph Kent and David Booth, and NGOs, like Oxfam and Save the Children, that explained how to understand a world where “capitalism” and “imperialism” had been magicked away. Causal narratives were deemed invalid because of the chaotic “complexity” of the interactions between people, things, and nature. General laws or determining relations were impossible. “What was, essentially, a celebratory rationalization of ignorance, served to render the outside world unknowable beyond immediate experience. Problems were tied to specific times and places, allowing no general historical connections to be drawn. If French political revanchism reached out to neoliberalism, British empiricism linked Western humanitarianism to quantification, cybernetics, and machine-learning. For Western humanitarianism, intercommunal warfare had no generalizable or overriding cause beyond the scarcity an...

Loose translation/interpretation by  Michael R. Burch Hamza was one of my hometown’s ordinary men who did manual labor for bread. When I saw him recently, the land still wore its mourning dress in the solemn windless silence and I felt defeated. But Hamza-the-unextraordinary said: “Sister, our land’s throbbing heart never ceases to pound,  and it perseveres, enduring the unendurable, keeping the secrets of mounds and wombs.  This land sprouting cactus spikes and palms also births freedom-fighters. Thus our land, my sister, is our mother!” Days passed and Hamza was nowhere to be seen, but I felt the land’s belly heaving in pain. At sixty-five Hamza’s a heavy burden on her back. “Burn down his house!” some commandant screamed, “and slap his son in a prison cell!” As our town’s military ruler later explained this was necessary for law and order, that is, an act of love, for peace! Armed soldiers surrounded Hamza’s house; the coiled serpent completed its circle. The bang at h...

If common sense is as much an interpretation of the immediacies of experience, a gloss on them, as are myth, painting, epistemology, or whatever, then it is, like them, historically constructed and, like them, subjected to historically defined standards of judgment. It can be questioned, disputed, affirmed, developed, formalized, contemplated, even taught, and it can vary dramatically from one people to the next. It is, in short, a cultural system, though not usually a very tightly integrated one, and it rests on the same basis that any other such system rests; the conviction by those whose possession it is of its value and validity. Here, as elsewhere, things are what you make of them. — Clifford Gertz

“Even former Nazis could identify with Israeli expansionism — and used this support to absolve their own pasts. “Between 80 and 100 percent of steel and iron for Israel’s growing machine industry came from German resource payments to Israel, without which Israel would have been unable to develop its industrial base…  By 1954, some 20 percent of Israel’s imports were from West Germany, making it Israel’s second-biggest import partner. “The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) gained access to a higher-quality arsenal. German officers were also sent to Israel to train the IDF, while Israeli officers were sent to Germany to be trained by the Bundeswehr, including future IDF chiefs such as Haim Laskov. “Over a thousand West Germans asked the Israeli embassy if they could become Israeli soldiers, including the writer Günter Grass, previously of the Waffen-SS. “Instead of  challenging  the capitalist elites that fed Nazism’s initial rise and continue to dominate German politics to this ...

Although aassociated with the U.S., apple pie's origin is England. “ Targeting vulnerable foreign students or migrant labourers for harassment , abuse and deportation is second nature to US ruling regimes - as American as their sugar-infested apple pie… “President Donald Trump did not invent this particular brand of American cruelty; he is just carrying it to its vicious ends. There is now a systematic crescendo of demonising Trump by the entire institution of liberal imperialism. Embarrassed by his refreshing vulgarity, they are using it as camouflage to exonerate the rest of American history - as if it was a haven of grace, kindness and generosity towards foreigners. “Trump is simply using the precedent set by previous presidents, from Carter to Obama, against people with a moral compass.”

“If Baran was silent, the real Barans of today are being forced into a silence that is far more violent. And I wonder what kind of country tells a child: you can die building it, but you can never live in it .” Related Majidi in context

From Kolbar to 'terrorist'