Agreed. Very insightful into Hitchens’ psychology and his unresolved two-mindedness about Said. Honestly one of the best pieces I have read on Substack, both in terms of substance and style.
There are so many african countries plagued with that nonsensical belief. Some larp as a third worldist to win elections or stay popular, but it's sad that some countries keep that faith alive. Besides Algeria, i would say South Africa's ANC believes it.
From this side of the pond I know little about Mamdani's political philosophy, so it will be interesting to see how that plays out. Civilisations generally benefit from the stimulus of imported ideas, even if they do not adopt them.
I feel you are glossing over an important aspect of the French era in Algeria when you say that "During the Algerian War of Independence, that same struggle against Europe often blurred into hostility toward Jewish communities."
As a Moroccan, I don't need to tell you that the North African Jewish communities had been established and coexisting with Amazigh and later Arabs, Christians and then Muslims, either for some two thousand years, or for 500 years after being expelled from the Iberian peninsula by the Christian conquistadores. In a deliberately divisive move in 1870, France's Crémieux Decree granted French citizenship to Algeria's Jews, but not to its Muslims. This had the obvious and intended effect of creating an intractable fracture, in a truly ancient equilibrium, that falsely aligned the Jews with Europe, with predictable consequences when the State of Israel was founded and Algeria won its independence.
I don’t know how Mamdani will actually govern when he wins; he wouldn’t be the first to moderate some hard edges once in office. But taking him at his word, it’s a linear exercise to project abject failure and deeper disillusionment for dems entering 2024.
Sorry to say it, as I vote D every time and would even vote for this guy if necessary. But to repeat two key points that are well known: Americans don’t like terrorists (Hamas) and don’t like socialism (Mamdami). Whatever legitimately cataloged abuses and colonial terrors of the past, and even with abhorrent recent behavior of Israel’s government; nevertheless, these two points tend to win elections in the USA. Which is one reasons Democrats tend to lose elections.
I’m not making a value judgment. I’m just reading the scoreboard. Dems should read it more often. Like, every day.
Perhaps not the right word - status quo, arrangement - whatever it was that permitted the Jews to remain in place for hundreds if not thousands of years, until the French swept it away with the stroke of a pen.
No, at times there was ethnic cleansing (if you consider pogroms a kind of ethnic cleansing, which I do).
At the same time, Jews such as Isma'il ibn Naghrilla "served as grand vizier of the Taifa of Granada, commander of its army in battle, and leader of the local Jewish community. Rising to unprecedented prominence in both Muslim and Jewish spheres, he became one of the most powerful and influential Jews in medieval Spain."
More recently, Jewish Berber André Azoulay, born in Essaouira, has served as financial adviser to two Moroccan monarchs over the last 40 years.
In today's polarised, binary mentalité, a lot of people struggle to reconcile facts like these.
As attributed to F.Scott Fitzgerald, "the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."
That's very fair, though I still don't like the framing in terms of a kinda-sorta equality that the Europeans destroyed from outside, rather than the Muslims, who were always the ones with the power, reneging on.
For Algeria's Jews the 1870 Crémieux Decree offered them "la belle vie" and integration, but after 1890 there were French/pied-noir Organisations Anti-Juives carrying out attacks across Algeria, and anti-semitic parties winning elections. 28 Jews were murdered in anti-Jewish riots in 1934. In 1940 the Vichy régime abrogates Crémieux and Jews are hounded out of the civil service and the entire education system. Jewish doctors and lawyers are struck off. A census is held in 1941 to "re-Aryanise" the economy. By 1962 all of Algeria's Jews have fled to France or Palestine.
So yes, in just this one location, in less than 100 years the Europeans did destroy, from outside, the Jews' 3,000 year old position in their ecosystem (the last 1,200 years of it under Muslim rule). Ecosystems have hierarchies and predators, but they enable survival.
The thing is, though, that other Arab countries like Iraq and Egypt also kicked out the Jews, or slowly made it impossible for them to stay, around the same time. The European colonisers also favoured other minorities, like the Alawites and Christians in Syria, without them being literally thrown out after independence. So I think that antisemitism accelerated by the conflict with Israel must be part of what led to the expulsion of the Jews in Algeria.
I think that’s what I was trying to say - in this instance with the Crémieux decree not only triggering Muslim resentment, for obvious reasons, but also French settler resentment 20 years later in the form of the Organisation Anti-Juive, inter alia, as Jews increasingly gained access to colonial Algeria’s professional cadres. This also relates to French internal politics i.e. the Dreyfus affair.
Its like Christianity, but without the forgiveness, self sacrifice or acts of humble service. Everything inverted through the lens that venerates victimhood.
This is a really interesting and important of of view and I think there is a lot to it. I think it is also important to note that the Soviet Union deliberately stoked this "third worldism," especially in the early 60's and continuing even to this day when it is no longer the Soviet Union. A few questions. Why Israel has become the last western fortress of colonialism given the continued efforts of larger western nations. Related to that - why focus almost exclusively on Palestine while other "struggles" are left largely ignored. And finally how they reconcile the merging of their movement with Islamism which is historically and to this day clearly a colonialist movement (Iran as a case study)
It's an interesting essay because it's filled with personal perspective and a different worldview. That's why I gave it a like. And it's also true that both Algeria and Morocco experienced rapid post-colonial improvements in areas like health and education, and both countries had a literacy rates of 10% in the colonial/protectorate days, and rapid gains in literacy are generally sure to produce a positive economic effect.
It certainly didn't help that both countries were subjects of French colonialism, which suffered from over-centralised statist approaches. The British decentralised approach of indirect rule and missionary schools produced better outcomes: 30–50% of school-age boys in British Africa were enrolled in school, compared to 5–15% in French Africa.
Here's the problem. Resentment and grievance will only get a country or a community so far. In some ways if a country is in absolutely dire straits it can act as a galvanising force, acting like the fuel in a tractor to accomplish sweeping changes. However, this only works up to the beginnings of the middle income level, beyond which almost all positive change is slow, incremental and amounts to fine-tuned improvements. It's why it's relatively easy for countries to get themselves up to a middle income level, but much more difficult to raise standards of living beyond this. Both countries are also good examples of why it's usually better to use PPP than nominal figures for most purposes, because PPP is a better reflections of living standards on the ground.
The problem is that socialists don't do decentralised or small, incremental, slow improvements. Their natural preference is for bold moves which are based upon narrative beliefs rather than empirical observation. This can be fine if the people are stricken by absolute poverty and coming out of colonial rule and drastic changes in the form of bold improvements are exactly what's needed, but as a country develops and becomes wealthier any change risks removing processes and solutions, public or private, which were markedly better than the new change being proposed- in effect, throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
It doesn't help that most socialist change is centralising in nature,, with the market-driven solutions it seeks to replace generally twice as good on a per dollar basis. Policymakers are also usually blissfully unaware that when positive and negative changes are of equal magnitude, the negative change will, on average, have long-term impacts five times worse than any benefit from the positive change- a critical factor when evaluating second and third-order effects.
However, there is one area which is an exception for advanced economies. Milei's shock therapy in Argentina was initially brutal, causing a sharp rise in poverty. However, because he drastically deregulated the rent sector this caused a rebound in living standards, especially for households which were struggling. Post-deregulation monthly listings rose +170% from 4,000 a month to 11,000. Rents shrunk by 40%. This countered the early poverty rise by improving affordability for 2-3 million urban poor. Drastic changes can work in more advanced economies provided they are deregulatory in nature.
The potential for change through rental sector deregulation is lower in New York, but it's not unrealistic to expect a 10-20% reduction in rents through deregulation and the increased supply which would result.
The problem is that out of 12 major policy changes Mamdani has proposed 9 out of 12 proposals involve displacing market-driven or community-led systems with a greater degree of centralisation. The other three are mixed. None focus on devolving power to communities or individuals, at least when one looks at the detail layer. It's a sure fire recipe for disastrous results.
None of his policies in his platform were any bit derivative of fanon. He doesn't come across as a psychopath. He's more optimistic in disposition. I have to assume his platform represents his views. Fanon is definitely an add-on.
Perhaps one of the most tortured bits of writing I’ve ever seen trying to smear anti-Israeli sentiment as somehow unfair or misguided when it mostly stems from watching the country commit the most widely covered genocide of the 21st century.
The US does not/did not have colonies? The Philippines? Hawaii? Puerto Rico? And please, fair to point out that North-African Jews were in a bit of a pickle when those countries became independent, but not fair not to mention the divide and rule tactics of French colonialism under which unlike Muslims native Jews were given French citizenship in 1870. That leads to an explanation that is a bit more subtle than the pro-Zionist dogma of supposedly eternal antisemitism. The problem with Mamdani is that just like every other socialist he has a gazillion ideas about playing Santa Claus with tax money but zero interest for the economic practicability and consequences. No need to take him more seriously than he deserves and come up with another culture war pamphlet that moreover manages to mention Israel and forget the Gaza genocide.
I admit I find it hard, from a strictly historical perspective, to consider Algerian Independence (or similar examples) de or post- colonial. It re-instated an Arab and Muslim majority into governance, which then expelled and suppressed existing minority communities and solidified the Arab/Muslim colonial identity violently imposed on much of the MENA through the Islamic conquests. Neither Arabic nor Islam are indigenous outside of the Arabian peninsula. When ppl talk of decolonizing Palestine, I often wonder if they understand that, under no historical circumstances, would such a place be Arab or Muslim. The Arab fight with European colonial powers is really a matter of picking one’s poison, or imperialist force.
Then you have totally understood the nature of Islamicisation and (in my opinion, potentially more important) Arabisation. Tying Arabic and Islam back to "colonial masters" back home in the Arabian peninsula is a common but totally inaccurate trope. The number of Arabic-speaking peninsula Arabs that invaded North Africa and then the Iberian peninsula was actually a fraction of the size of the populations that they Arabised and Islamicised (and not always successfully, as evidenced by non-Muslim, non-Arabic speaking Touareg, Berber and Judaeo-Berber populations in Algeria and Morocco, even to this day. Check out the Dagganout of Tamentit). Abd er-Rahman 1 founded his Iberian dynasty with a Berber wife. The Almohads who took over in the 11th century were Berber, not Arab. The indigenous population that the French colonised was a predominantly but incompletely Arabised and Islamicised Berber, Arab and Arab/Berber population with a significant Arabic-speaking Jewish minority that lived and worked alongside their Muslim neighbours as jewellers, locksmiths etc. Through the (unwanted) Crémieux decree, pieds-noirs "Organisations Anti-Juives" and the subsequent Vichy régime the French dealt the Jewish community a series of criminally destructive blows that left them no option other than to flee with the French pieds noirs to countries they had never set eyes on.
So it is wholly inaccurate to describe the Algerian population as "not indigenous" on account of their being Muslim and (partly) Arabic speaking.
Unless you are suggesting that Berbers, Amazigh, Kabyle etc. are not indigenous to North Africa either, in which case I think Zineb Riboua will have to have a few stern words with you!
Pure slop and buzzwords. Not even trying to justify the connection between Mamdani, Fanon, and Algeria. No wonder conservatives and conservative adjacents routinely get their brains completely broken when this is the garbage they routinely consume like pigs eating out of a trough
I don’t think Mandami’s views go that deep. My guess is that it’s more simple that that: his parents locked into their core beliefs in the late 1970s or early 80s when they were probably in their early 20s. At that time, anticolonial Franz Fanon type views were fresh and popular and reasonably mainstream. But then they never changed their beliefs or apparently learned anything new. Zohran absorbed this growing up in Columbia faculty housing and never did his own thinking. I have a close friend of around the same age as Mira Nair (as am I). My friend is intelligent but really has not had a new thought about politics or economics since 1983. And I would add that for lefty types or my vintage, it’s a stretch to say they even had thoughts on economics. Most of them avoided Ec classes because the classes supposedly were “evil” but really because the students themselves were uncomfortable with math and didn’t want to end up drawing supply and demand curves. It’s easy to be a true believer in constraining markets (eg government run supermarkets or rent control) if you have no way of calculating or even understanding what the impact is.
And the successful decolonisation movements of the 1960's ended in the rise of oppressive authoritarianism and those countries are faring far, far worse than say India which adopted the ideals of liberal enlightenment.
Yes! Under Xi Jing Ping. China after Deng & especially under Hu who adopted Jintoa was on its way to adopt more liberalisation policies. The ethno-nationalist authoritarian nativist Xi Jing Ping. I can Iove how you secular religious zealots ( commies ) with a sadistic need to control our inner light & make it bow to your religious ( commie idelogical) dikkat fail to mention the success of Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, and other South East Asian countries. Hong Kong was a thriving city before China destroyed it.
But liberal enlightenment predates Europe & Chinese people are materialistic entrepreneurs with an animal spirt that matches Americans. They will overcome the Western born disease called communism. The civilization where modern finance started will break themselves from the shackles of secular religious tyranny & find their voice again.
People like you, and this thread / pages generally, are a cesspit of ideas of 'self' which are unsupported by ideas of human (societal) improvement, (y'know, actual research on human development), and just a bit shit, really.
Fortunately you dopes are going to be irrelevant somewhat soon. Though you do damage meanwhile.
You are confusing rugged individualism espoused by the illiberal segregationist right. Liberalism's intrinsic individual right can exist when the community is economically & politically healthy & robust. Liberal Enlightenment is the triumph of human reason over the tyranny of an intersection of feudal & cannon laws. You should read the philosophers and what they were fighting for before you give up the very idea of intrinsic individual right & plunge us back to violence & tyranny. And buddy only in a liberal open society can you bash it & spit at it & still not be issued a death sentence as happened under the intersection of feudal & cannon laws system & Communist state. 👍🏽👍🏽
Ok, we get the underlying, central theme that persists, but this completely ignores the actual role that the Zionist Israeli regime has played and continues to play in global affairs. It’s not wrong to question a Zionist agenda. As an an Irish-Italian-Portuguese American, I have many questions, like why in the actual hell are they so involved and influential in American politics and why do they have an eternal hall pass to do whatever the hell they want? There is a lot of circumstantial evidence that Israel has been behind many of the most significant events of US History, especially the last 100 years. People are done blindly accepting the mainstream storyline on Israel. Momdani’s popularity captures the questions that many now have.
To start educating yourself, try asking ChatGPT but be sure to add - " to what extent is my perception accurate about what I'm claiming? Is there context I'm missing (eg, about lobbying and who does it and to what extent, proportions, etcetera?" You should get a bunch of different sources. You can go checking them and try weighing and considering different things. If being humbly informed is your goal, that is... if feeling righteous about an familiar sinister force in familiarly ugly terms is what you really want to do, I'm sure you'll find a justification like so many others.
AIPAC is taxpayer funded by Jewish Americans and Christian Zionists. They, like every lobby group, tries to influence US lawmakers. All major businesses, countries, organizations etc do this, but somehow only AIPAC is noticed 🤔 weird, huh?
Mandami captures Jew hate, something you seem to be inflicted with." Israel behind most significant events in US history? " Like what? I see the JFK assassination, 9-11, conspiracy theories floating around, are you talking about those? It's not that people are blinding accepting the mainstream storyline on Israel, it's just that never ending anti semitism is raising its head, and you're falling for it. Somehow Israel gets attacked on all sides, fights the aggressors off, and they're seen as the aggressors. 🤔
Have you ever seen the documentary L'avocat de la terreur?
It's about Jacques Verges and is a perfect exploration of the third worldist mindset, full off resentful victim mentality and the excusing of terrorism.
Mamdani is the spiritual child of Edward Said.
Interesting how so many "refugees" come to the West and then use it as a platform for *their* enthnonationalism. Said, Mamdani, Omar etc.
Interesting, how so? Could you elaborate?
https://open.substack.com/pub/maralsalmassi/p/hitchens-and-said-on-envy-guilt-and?r=4pbde0&utm_medium=ios
Thank you for sharing that, I'll read it more closely.
Tour de force article on Said. Thank you for posting that link.
You are welcome! I thought so too…I especially loved the contrast to Hitchens, just very on-point.
Agreed. Very insightful into Hitchens’ psychology and his unresolved two-mindedness about Said. Honestly one of the best pieces I have read on Substack, both in terms of substance and style.
Agree completely!
There are so many african countries plagued with that nonsensical belief. Some larp as a third worldist to win elections or stay popular, but it's sad that some countries keep that faith alive. Besides Algeria, i would say South Africa's ANC believes it.
From this side of the pond I know little about Mamdani's political philosophy, so it will be interesting to see how that plays out. Civilisations generally benefit from the stimulus of imported ideas, even if they do not adopt them.
I feel you are glossing over an important aspect of the French era in Algeria when you say that "During the Algerian War of Independence, that same struggle against Europe often blurred into hostility toward Jewish communities."
As a Moroccan, I don't need to tell you that the North African Jewish communities had been established and coexisting with Amazigh and later Arabs, Christians and then Muslims, either for some two thousand years, or for 500 years after being expelled from the Iberian peninsula by the Christian conquistadores. In a deliberately divisive move in 1870, France's Crémieux Decree granted French citizenship to Algeria's Jews, but not to its Muslims. This had the obvious and intended effect of creating an intractable fracture, in a truly ancient equilibrium, that falsely aligned the Jews with Europe, with predictable consequences when the State of Israel was founded and Algeria won its independence.
The "equilibrium" of dhimma?
I don’t know how Mamdani will actually govern when he wins; he wouldn’t be the first to moderate some hard edges once in office. But taking him at his word, it’s a linear exercise to project abject failure and deeper disillusionment for dems entering 2024.
Sorry to say it, as I vote D every time and would even vote for this guy if necessary. But to repeat two key points that are well known: Americans don’t like terrorists (Hamas) and don’t like socialism (Mamdami). Whatever legitimately cataloged abuses and colonial terrors of the past, and even with abhorrent recent behavior of Israel’s government; nevertheless, these two points tend to win elections in the USA. Which is one reasons Democrats tend to lose elections.
I’m not making a value judgment. I’m just reading the scoreboard. Dems should read it more often. Like, every day.
Perhaps not the right word - status quo, arrangement - whatever it was that permitted the Jews to remain in place for hundreds if not thousands of years, until the French swept it away with the stroke of a pen.
The right word would be "oppression without ethnic cleansing".
No, at times there was ethnic cleansing (if you consider pogroms a kind of ethnic cleansing, which I do).
At the same time, Jews such as Isma'il ibn Naghrilla "served as grand vizier of the Taifa of Granada, commander of its army in battle, and leader of the local Jewish community. Rising to unprecedented prominence in both Muslim and Jewish spheres, he became one of the most powerful and influential Jews in medieval Spain."
More recently, Jewish Berber André Azoulay, born in Essaouira, has served as financial adviser to two Moroccan monarchs over the last 40 years.
In today's polarised, binary mentalité, a lot of people struggle to reconcile facts like these.
As attributed to F.Scott Fitzgerald, "the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."
That's very fair, though I still don't like the framing in terms of a kinda-sorta equality that the Europeans destroyed from outside, rather than the Muslims, who were always the ones with the power, reneging on.
For Algeria's Jews the 1870 Crémieux Decree offered them "la belle vie" and integration, but after 1890 there were French/pied-noir Organisations Anti-Juives carrying out attacks across Algeria, and anti-semitic parties winning elections. 28 Jews were murdered in anti-Jewish riots in 1934. In 1940 the Vichy régime abrogates Crémieux and Jews are hounded out of the civil service and the entire education system. Jewish doctors and lawyers are struck off. A census is held in 1941 to "re-Aryanise" the economy. By 1962 all of Algeria's Jews have fled to France or Palestine.
So yes, in just this one location, in less than 100 years the Europeans did destroy, from outside, the Jews' 3,000 year old position in their ecosystem (the last 1,200 years of it under Muslim rule). Ecosystems have hierarchies and predators, but they enable survival.
The thing is, though, that other Arab countries like Iraq and Egypt also kicked out the Jews, or slowly made it impossible for them to stay, around the same time. The European colonisers also favoured other minorities, like the Alawites and Christians in Syria, without them being literally thrown out after independence. So I think that antisemitism accelerated by the conflict with Israel must be part of what led to the expulsion of the Jews in Algeria.
I think that’s what I was trying to say - in this instance with the Crémieux decree not only triggering Muslim resentment, for obvious reasons, but also French settler resentment 20 years later in the form of the Organisation Anti-Juive, inter alia, as Jews increasingly gained access to colonial Algeria’s professional cadres. This also relates to French internal politics i.e. the Dreyfus affair.
That was helpful information. Thank you.
Its like Christianity, but without the forgiveness, self sacrifice or acts of humble service. Everything inverted through the lens that venerates victimhood.
It's like what Christianity would be if the point was for Jesus to pull himself off the cross and start massacring everyone around him.
Hysterical
This is a really interesting and important of of view and I think there is a lot to it. I think it is also important to note that the Soviet Union deliberately stoked this "third worldism," especially in the early 60's and continuing even to this day when it is no longer the Soviet Union. A few questions. Why Israel has become the last western fortress of colonialism given the continued efforts of larger western nations. Related to that - why focus almost exclusively on Palestine while other "struggles" are left largely ignored. And finally how they reconcile the merging of their movement with Islamism which is historically and to this day clearly a colonialist movement (Iran as a case study)
It's an interesting essay because it's filled with personal perspective and a different worldview. That's why I gave it a like. And it's also true that both Algeria and Morocco experienced rapid post-colonial improvements in areas like health and education, and both countries had a literacy rates of 10% in the colonial/protectorate days, and rapid gains in literacy are generally sure to produce a positive economic effect.
It certainly didn't help that both countries were subjects of French colonialism, which suffered from over-centralised statist approaches. The British decentralised approach of indirect rule and missionary schools produced better outcomes: 30–50% of school-age boys in British Africa were enrolled in school, compared to 5–15% in French Africa.
Here's the problem. Resentment and grievance will only get a country or a community so far. In some ways if a country is in absolutely dire straits it can act as a galvanising force, acting like the fuel in a tractor to accomplish sweeping changes. However, this only works up to the beginnings of the middle income level, beyond which almost all positive change is slow, incremental and amounts to fine-tuned improvements. It's why it's relatively easy for countries to get themselves up to a middle income level, but much more difficult to raise standards of living beyond this. Both countries are also good examples of why it's usually better to use PPP than nominal figures for most purposes, because PPP is a better reflections of living standards on the ground.
The problem is that socialists don't do decentralised or small, incremental, slow improvements. Their natural preference is for bold moves which are based upon narrative beliefs rather than empirical observation. This can be fine if the people are stricken by absolute poverty and coming out of colonial rule and drastic changes in the form of bold improvements are exactly what's needed, but as a country develops and becomes wealthier any change risks removing processes and solutions, public or private, which were markedly better than the new change being proposed- in effect, throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
It doesn't help that most socialist change is centralising in nature,, with the market-driven solutions it seeks to replace generally twice as good on a per dollar basis. Policymakers are also usually blissfully unaware that when positive and negative changes are of equal magnitude, the negative change will, on average, have long-term impacts five times worse than any benefit from the positive change- a critical factor when evaluating second and third-order effects.
However, there is one area which is an exception for advanced economies. Milei's shock therapy in Argentina was initially brutal, causing a sharp rise in poverty. However, because he drastically deregulated the rent sector this caused a rebound in living standards, especially for households which were struggling. Post-deregulation monthly listings rose +170% from 4,000 a month to 11,000. Rents shrunk by 40%. This countered the early poverty rise by improving affordability for 2-3 million urban poor. Drastic changes can work in more advanced economies provided they are deregulatory in nature.
The potential for change through rental sector deregulation is lower in New York, but it's not unrealistic to expect a 10-20% reduction in rents through deregulation and the increased supply which would result.
The problem is that out of 12 major policy changes Mamdani has proposed 9 out of 12 proposals involve displacing market-driven or community-led systems with a greater degree of centralisation. The other three are mixed. None focus on devolving power to communities or individuals, at least when one looks at the detail layer. It's a sure fire recipe for disastrous results.
Thanks, good points.
None of his policies in his platform were any bit derivative of fanon. He doesn't come across as a psychopath. He's more optimistic in disposition. I have to assume his platform represents his views. Fanon is definitely an add-on.
Perhaps one of the most tortured bits of writing I’ve ever seen trying to smear anti-Israeli sentiment as somehow unfair or misguided when it mostly stems from watching the country commit the most widely covered genocide of the 21st century.
The US does not/did not have colonies? The Philippines? Hawaii? Puerto Rico? And please, fair to point out that North-African Jews were in a bit of a pickle when those countries became independent, but not fair not to mention the divide and rule tactics of French colonialism under which unlike Muslims native Jews were given French citizenship in 1870. That leads to an explanation that is a bit more subtle than the pro-Zionist dogma of supposedly eternal antisemitism. The problem with Mamdani is that just like every other socialist he has a gazillion ideas about playing Santa Claus with tax money but zero interest for the economic practicability and consequences. No need to take him more seriously than he deserves and come up with another culture war pamphlet that moreover manages to mention Israel and forget the Gaza genocide.
There was no Genocide in Gaza.
😂
I admit I find it hard, from a strictly historical perspective, to consider Algerian Independence (or similar examples) de or post- colonial. It re-instated an Arab and Muslim majority into governance, which then expelled and suppressed existing minority communities and solidified the Arab/Muslim colonial identity violently imposed on much of the MENA through the Islamic conquests. Neither Arabic nor Islam are indigenous outside of the Arabian peninsula. When ppl talk of decolonizing Palestine, I often wonder if they understand that, under no historical circumstances, would such a place be Arab or Muslim. The Arab fight with European colonial powers is really a matter of picking one’s poison, or imperialist force.
Then you have totally understood the nature of Islamicisation and (in my opinion, potentially more important) Arabisation. Tying Arabic and Islam back to "colonial masters" back home in the Arabian peninsula is a common but totally inaccurate trope. The number of Arabic-speaking peninsula Arabs that invaded North Africa and then the Iberian peninsula was actually a fraction of the size of the populations that they Arabised and Islamicised (and not always successfully, as evidenced by non-Muslim, non-Arabic speaking Touareg, Berber and Judaeo-Berber populations in Algeria and Morocco, even to this day. Check out the Dagganout of Tamentit). Abd er-Rahman 1 founded his Iberian dynasty with a Berber wife. The Almohads who took over in the 11th century were Berber, not Arab. The indigenous population that the French colonised was a predominantly but incompletely Arabised and Islamicised Berber, Arab and Arab/Berber population with a significant Arabic-speaking Jewish minority that lived and worked alongside their Muslim neighbours as jewellers, locksmiths etc. Through the (unwanted) Crémieux decree, pieds-noirs "Organisations Anti-Juives" and the subsequent Vichy régime the French dealt the Jewish community a series of criminally destructive blows that left them no option other than to flee with the French pieds noirs to countries they had never set eyes on.
So it is wholly inaccurate to describe the Algerian population as "not indigenous" on account of their being Muslim and (partly) Arabic speaking.
Unless you are suggesting that Berbers, Amazigh, Kabyle etc. are not indigenous to North Africa either, in which case I think Zineb Riboua will have to have a few stern words with you!
An under-analyzed strand of the DSA program—thank you.
Pure slop and buzzwords. Not even trying to justify the connection between Mamdani, Fanon, and Algeria. No wonder conservatives and conservative adjacents routinely get their brains completely broken when this is the garbage they routinely consume like pigs eating out of a trough
I don’t think Mandami’s views go that deep. My guess is that it’s more simple that that: his parents locked into their core beliefs in the late 1970s or early 80s when they were probably in their early 20s. At that time, anticolonial Franz Fanon type views were fresh and popular and reasonably mainstream. But then they never changed their beliefs or apparently learned anything new. Zohran absorbed this growing up in Columbia faculty housing and never did his own thinking. I have a close friend of around the same age as Mira Nair (as am I). My friend is intelligent but really has not had a new thought about politics or economics since 1983. And I would add that for lefty types or my vintage, it’s a stretch to say they even had thoughts on economics. Most of them avoided Ec classes because the classes supposedly were “evil” but really because the students themselves were uncomfortable with math and didn’t want to end up drawing supply and demand curves. It’s easy to be a true believer in constraining markets (eg government run supermarkets or rent control) if you have no way of calculating or even understanding what the impact is.
And the successful decolonisation movements of the 1960's ended in the rise of oppressive authoritarianism and those countries are faring far, far worse than say India which adopted the ideals of liberal enlightenment.
Is China (Peoples' Republic of China) "faring far, far worse than (any country) which adopted the ideals of liberal enlightenment" ?
For anyone else reading this:
https://thediplomat.com/2026/01/why-chinas-exploitative-labor-system-gives-it-a-strategic-edge/?fbclid=IwY2xjawPQ7ExleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZA80MDk5NjI2MjMwODU2MDkAAR5AiP9ZF_wgsdfydTHmFV6feUb30Dg3W9dtdGnq8zfRi6rgFy7DFQS0Oj10sQ_aem_gTqhhqkjbaadiA8TE_dM3w
Yes! Under Xi Jing Ping. China after Deng & especially under Hu who adopted Jintoa was on its way to adopt more liberalisation policies. The ethno-nationalist authoritarian nativist Xi Jing Ping. I can Iove how you secular religious zealots ( commies ) with a sadistic need to control our inner light & make it bow to your religious ( commie idelogical) dikkat fail to mention the success of Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, and other South East Asian countries. Hong Kong was a thriving city before China destroyed it.
But liberal enlightenment predates Europe & Chinese people are materialistic entrepreneurs with an animal spirt that matches Americans. They will overcome the Western born disease called communism. The civilization where modern finance started will break themselves from the shackles of secular religious tyranny & find their voice again.
You 'love' that do you? How wonderful for you.
People like you, and this thread / pages generally, are a cesspit of ideas of 'self' which are unsupported by ideas of human (societal) improvement, (y'know, actual research on human development), and just a bit shit, really.
Fortunately you dopes are going to be irrelevant somewhat soon. Though you do damage meanwhile.
You are confusing rugged individualism espoused by the illiberal segregationist right. Liberalism's intrinsic individual right can exist when the community is economically & politically healthy & robust. Liberal Enlightenment is the triumph of human reason over the tyranny of an intersection of feudal & cannon laws. You should read the philosophers and what they were fighting for before you give up the very idea of intrinsic individual right & plunge us back to violence & tyranny. And buddy only in a liberal open society can you bash it & spit at it & still not be issued a death sentence as happened under the intersection of feudal & cannon laws system & Communist state. 👍🏽👍🏽
Ok, we get the underlying, central theme that persists, but this completely ignores the actual role that the Zionist Israeli regime has played and continues to play in global affairs. It’s not wrong to question a Zionist agenda. As an an Irish-Italian-Portuguese American, I have many questions, like why in the actual hell are they so involved and influential in American politics and why do they have an eternal hall pass to do whatever the hell they want? There is a lot of circumstantial evidence that Israel has been behind many of the most significant events of US History, especially the last 100 years. People are done blindly accepting the mainstream storyline on Israel. Momdani’s popularity captures the questions that many now have.
To start educating yourself, try asking ChatGPT but be sure to add - " to what extent is my perception accurate about what I'm claiming? Is there context I'm missing (eg, about lobbying and who does it and to what extent, proportions, etcetera?" You should get a bunch of different sources. You can go checking them and try weighing and considering different things. If being humbly informed is your goal, that is... if feeling righteous about an familiar sinister force in familiarly ugly terms is what you really want to do, I'm sure you'll find a justification like so many others.
Or maybe I could just ask ChatGPT about AIPAC. Or maybe you should? Or maybe you can google the definition of righteous?
AIPAC is taxpayer funded by Jewish Americans and Christian Zionists. They, like every lobby group, tries to influence US lawmakers. All major businesses, countries, organizations etc do this, but somehow only AIPAC is noticed 🤔 weird, huh?
Yeah, no surprise
Mandami captures Jew hate, something you seem to be inflicted with." Israel behind most significant events in US history? " Like what? I see the JFK assassination, 9-11, conspiracy theories floating around, are you talking about those? It's not that people are blinding accepting the mainstream storyline on Israel, it's just that never ending anti semitism is raising its head, and you're falling for it. Somehow Israel gets attacked on all sides, fights the aggressors off, and they're seen as the aggressors. 🤔
Great essay.
Have you ever seen the documentary L'avocat de la terreur?
It's about Jacques Verges and is a perfect exploration of the third worldist mindset, full off resentful victim mentality and the excusing of terrorism.