Mehdi Boussebaa

This war has once again exposed the fact that our economic system is irrational, indefensible, and fundamentally anti-human. It’s never been clearer that we really do face a choice between the end of the world and the end of capitalism. open.substack.com/pub/graceblake…

Scottish newspaper The National is a constant reminder of what an English newspaper might look like – if they weren't all owned by billionaires.

'Iran Is Not Gaza': Read Arundhati Roy's Scathing Speech on the US-Israeli War Exclusive: The award-winning Indian novelist warns that the world is on the brink of nuclear calamity and economic collapse, and laments her own government's gutlessness. zeteo.com/p/iran-is-not-…

Macron making himself an appendage of illegal US foreign policy by mobilising an aircraft carrier that is literally named after *Charles de Gaulle* is an extraordinary farce. De Gaulle would despise this man’s cowardice and vassalage. Pathetic.

Before its attack on Iran, the US had spent years trying to starve its people into an uprising, just as Israel blockaded and starved the people of Gaza for some 16 years on the assumption that they would be encouraged to overthrow Hamas. The strategy failed in both cases. Why? Because it ignored the simplest of facts: that the people being abused are human beings, who will always choose freedom and dignity over degradation and subordination. Now led by the nose into a humiliating war of attrition with Iran, the US is lashing out like a “mad dog” – just as Israel did in Gaza after it was humiliated by Hamas’ one-day breakout from the concentration camp Israel had created for Palestinians there. Hegseth’s “no rules of engagement” means the US is now open about the fact that all of Iran has been turned into a free-fire zone, just as Gaza was. Which explains why one of the first targets of the US and Israeli strikes was a primary school where more than 170 people were killed, most of them children under the age of 12. According to reports even in the rightwing Telegraph newspaper, US and Israeli attacks have already created an “apocalypse” in Tehran. Essential civilian infrastructure is being targeted, such as hospitals, schools and police stations. Residential areas are being carpet-bombed, and food and medical supplies are rapidly running out. Rubio has vowed that much worse is to come. The US has evidently been captured by the depraved logic of the Dahiya doctrine, which Israel developed in its repeated attacks on Lebanon and further refined over two and a half years in Gaza. The Dahiya doctrine goes much further than simply the idea of asymmetric warfare inherent to attacks by a stronger party on a weaker party. Under the doctrine, civilian casualties are no longer unfortunate “collateral damage” from strikes against military assets. Rather, the civilian population are treated as no less legitimate targets of attack than military infrastructure. For Israel, the Dahiya doctrine grew out of an acceptance that there were no meaningful war aims that Israel could achieve in its battles against the Palestinians it ruled over or against Hizbullah’s resistance in Lebanon. Israel was unsatisfied simply with pacifying the Palestinians. It knew they could not be pacified indefinitely, given that it had no intention of ever arriving at a political settlement with them. The fabled two-state solution was purely for western consumption; it never had any meaningful constituency of support in Israel. Rather, Israel’s goal was to use overwhelming and indiscriminate violence to terrify the Palestinians into ethnically cleansing themselves from the region, as had partially occurred in 1948. Similarly, in Lebanon, where the Dahiya doctrine was first developed, the goal was not to reach a political accommodation with Hizbullah through a show of force. Hizbullah had made clear it would never resign itself to watching the Palestinians erased from their homeland. The goal was to wreak so much pain on Lebanon that other religious sects would turn on Hizbullah and plunge the country into protracted civil war, leaving Israel free to get on with the expulsion – and now genocide – of the Palestinian people. Under the Dahiya doctrine, Israel implicitly acknowledged that it was not fighting simply against militants but against the wider society from which those militants were drawn. It had to accept that there could be no victory, no surrender, assessed in traditional military terms. So what it had to do instead was leave a smouldering ruin. Time and again, Israel has used massive firepower on civilian infrastructure and residential areas to break the will of a society – to drive it back into “the Stone Age”, to use the terminology of Israeli generals – so that the population would expend their energies on survival rather than resistance. This is what Hegseth and Rubio are now declaring as Washington’s war aims in Iran. A wilful, savage demonstration of mass destruction to no purpose other than the demonstration itself. This is an extract from my latest article. Find a link to the rest in the reply post ⬇️

The US/Israeli carpet-bombing of Iran is a war crime under the Geneva Convention, and an abomination. They are massacring civilians in their homes. It is unacceptable for European leaders to join the invasion. Indeed they are obligated to do everything in their power to stop it.

Aerial footage shows rows of graves being prepared for the victims of the Minab primary school massacre, where 165 students were killed and dozens wounded after an Israeli-American strike targeted the school on the first day of the aggression.

Énorme colère de l’historien Benjamin Stora, ulcéré par le niveau pathétique des journalistes du service public et leur censure, qui insistent pour parler d’un influenceur bidon plutôt que parler histoire, colonisation, réconciliation et mémoire !

Rubio's speech was obviously imperialist and repulsive (and all global South states should take note, and plan deterrence accordingly). But it also shows he understands an important historical fact that most people do not grasp, and which the US has spent the past half century trying to erase and obscure. Namely, the anti-colonial movement, which was one of humanity's greatest moral and political achievements, was led in large part under the banner of socialism. Rubio referred to "anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come." The hammer and sickle... the symbol of the workers and peasants - overwhelmingly in the global South - whose labour creates the world's wealth... The national liberation movements - and the masses of workers and peasants they mobilized and represented - understood that they needed to regain control over their resources and productive capacities, and organize them around human needs and development rather than around servicing capital accumulation in the core. Socialist ideas provided a method for achieving this, and with remarkable results. It is crucial to understand that socialism gained *enormous* global prestige with the success of the anti-colonial revolutions. And this prestige was further cemented when the socialist countries (mainly the USSR and China) played a decisive role in defeating fascism, which was spawned within and promoted by the capitalist core and inflicted brutal violence not only within Europe but much more extensively in the colonized territories. Socialism was so popular at the time that the US, as the rising imperial power seeking to consolidate hegemony, tried (falsely) to paint itself as a champion of anti-colonialism and anti-fascism. Of course, this was a lie: the US was created through violent colonization, complete with fascist ideology (which they leveraged to justify ethnic cleansing, genocide, mass enslavement and apartheid). The fact that the US represented itself this way - through an aggressive propaganda strategy - is testament to the popularity and prestige that socialism held. Rubio is now dispensing with the propaganda, and in the process reveals the reality... that the West is doubling down on imperialism, once again with openly fascist ideology, and they recognize the only real force that has ever held them in check: socialist and anti-colonial movements.

🗣️"La décadence commence avec l'admiration de la force." 👉Patrick Boucheron montre comment l’appauvrissement du langage, combiné à une fascination pour l’autorité, nous éloigne progressivement de la démocratie.

Courageous actions of London Opera actors at the end of the show 👏

Le RN, parti des milliardaires En volant au secours des ultra-riches, le RN s’est clairement affirmé comme le parti des milliardaires, comme un parti de droite, sur tous les plans, de la même façon que les républicains de Donald Trump. wp.me/pgT76t-C0

Petition · Oppose Tony Blair's appointment to Gaza administration - Change.org - well over 5300 signatures and seems to have second wind! Let’s get 6K! ⁦@andre_spicer⁩ ⁦@LavenderNRed⁩ ⁦@PSCupdates⁩ ⁦@andrewfeinstein⁩ change.org/p/oppose-tony-…

This man is a psychopath and would be in jail in any vaguely sane democracy. Instead he is a proudly fascist Minister in Israel’s government. And one of the most racist human beings there has ever been - and I grew up in apartheid South Africa. This is what the West is supporting.

Economics is uniquely insular and inward-looking. All disciplines lean toward citing their own work, but economics does so far more: 81% of its citations are within-field, compared with just 52% in sociology, 53% in anthropology, and 59% in political science.

All eyes on the Global Sumud Flotilla.

Share if you agree.

This is the first dire wolf howl heard on Earth in over 10,000 years. Romulus and his siblings are healthy, growing fast, and changing everything we know about extinction. Follow to hear their story and discover which species we're reviving next.

We must recognise Pres. Trump for his visionary speech: unmatched imagination, pure stream-of-consciousness, the rare gift of saying whatever comes to mind, on anything, to anyone. A masterclass for sociology, int'l relations, and political science. Just hardly any law in it.