Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The most bizarre, entertaining history of Japan you'll ever watch

Report on Syria conflict finds 11.5% of population killed or injured The report notes that the rest of the world has been slow to wake up to the dimensions of the crisis. “Despite the fact that Syrians have been suffering for … five years, global attention to human rights and dignity for them only intensified when the crisis had a direct impact on the societies of developed countries.” When the Paris attacks happened a colleague of mine, a white Westerner, called them "terror".  I wondered then she might have said when more than million Iraqi were killed as a direct result of the invasion of Iraq, which itself gave birth to ISIS. "Terror" when it takes place in Western capitals and Western lives are lost. The fact is that even when Western and white people are killed at home, the outrage against the states which have generated the context of terror through their very own terror is almost absent. Instead, anger and violence are directed against the oppressed and...

Egypt The same rhetoric by the liberals: "the first democratically-elected president". Elections held under the rule of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces with those who had more money 'shared power': the Muslim Brotherhood in Government, but the army controlled the rest, the main levers of power. The liberals in Egypt and the West have participated in the counter-revolution since January 2011. The Western media haild it as a "revolution" supporting the deals struck behind the scenes between the regime, the MB and the Western powers, especially the Americans and the British. They maintain their financial and military support of the dictatorship. No word of that in Reuters blog post . In short, the big powers have never supported a progressive movement in Egypt, or anywhere else in the region. They merely pay lip service to "freedom" and "democracy" while aborting any possibility for real change because it threatens their imperiali...

The children of Soviet Africa search for their own identity

‘To each his own weapon, I have my camera’: Iran's 1979 revolution – in pictures It took Maryam Zandi more than three decades to get her photos of the revolution published

Reimagining Architecture and Cities: A Reading List

"Unless It Changes, Capitalism Will Starve Humanity by 2050" Or  Forbes, How to save capitalism from capitalism. 

Exodus and betrayal: How a Syrian Nakba was created

Les racines de l’État islamique

The Dream That Became a Nightmare   " a progressive solution inside the eurozone is impossible."

Books interview: David Harvey

Beyoncé’s capitalism, masquerading as radical change

W hy Are Russian Engineers Working at an Islamic State-Controlled Gas Plant in S yria?

"The war on terror" and our friends in barbarity Tony Wood (NLR 2004): What has been the international response to the ongoing assault on Chechen statehood? As the Chechen foreign ministry official Roman Khalilov dryly notes, ‘the international community’s record of timely, painless recognition of secession is extremely poor’.  [51]  Here Chechnya has been a casualty of the basest  Realpolitik . Western governments gave the nod to Yeltsin’s war as a regrettable side-effect of a presidency that had at all costs to be prolonged, if capitalism was to be successful in Russia. Putin has benefited from a similarly craven consensus. Yet for all the column inches expended on the harm done to Russia’s fragile democracy by the imprisonment of  YUKOS chairman  Mikhail Khodorkovsky, it is in Chechnya that the face of Putin’s regime is truly revealed, and it is above all by its sponsorship of wanton brutality there that it should be judged. The few early criticisms of ...

Origins of the Police

From Palestine to the Spanish Civil War: Documentary proposes new reading of Arabs' history

"What happened was what always happens when a state possessing great military strength enters into relations with primitive, small peoples living their independent lives. Either on the pretext of self-defence, even though any attacks are always provoked by the offences of the strong neighbour, or on the pretext of bringing civilization to a wild people, even though this wild people lives incomparably better and more peacefully than its civilizers . . . the servants of large military states commit all sorts of villainy against small nations, insisting that it is impossible to deal with them in any other way." Leo Tolstoy, 1902 draft of Hadji Murat 

“Facebook teaches you how to be a neoliberal agent”. An interview with Philip Mirowski "Under neoliberal pressure the university has been totally transformed. There was a time when people might have wanted some sort of university legitimacy, but that is becoming less and less important since universities are becoming more like think tanks, places for hiring intellectuals. The university doesn’t produce experts today; it produces research programmes for those who want to pay for it, which is exactly what neoliberals want”.  

A great quote from 19th century economist Frederic Bastiat:  “ When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorises it and a moral code that glorifies it”. The never-ending banking story continues with the biggest character in this story of greed, recklessness, fraud and criminality being the British 'global bank' HSBC.

Crimes abroad...crimes at home, too On Thursday 4 February 2016 the [British] Government unveiled the privatisation of its final stake in Royal Mail, bringing the curtain down on five centuries of state ownership. Also ' Is there no limit to what this Government will privatise? ': UK plasma supplier sold to US private equity firm Bain Capital

Figures of the Other: Brother, Neighbour, Stranger, Enemy "Christianity preaches the love of the neighbour, yet ultimately reduces him to a repetition of the  self. Modern democracy rests on fraternity, but all too often distorts it into inconsistent ideolo gies of identity, which pave the way for more or less explicit forms of racism. The battle for the  emancipation of woman runs itself the risk of succumbing to a global dispositif of sameness  dominated by Capital and its ruthless values. Faced with unprecedented social, economical,  and political crises, we are today increasingly urged to treat any kind of otherness that chal lenges our fragile egos as an enemy."

For someone who has recently been in Saigon, this gives me a chill in the spine. 1965-1975:  Another Vietnam Unseen images of the war from the winning side

Asylum claims are not the cause of the UK’s  record immigration

Vicious union-busting at Moroccan fish canner DOHA

The Tunisian Uprising and Beyond "In focusing his work on the technologies through which subject populations were ‘incorporated into – and not excluded from – the arena of colonial power,’ Mamdani substantiates his notion of the bifurcated state as a mode of governance. Bringing this analysis to its logical conclusion, he argues that ‘no reform of contemporary civil society institutions can by itself unravel’ such power. Rather, to redress the legacies (both material and epistemological) of the bifurcated colonial state would ‘require nothing less than dismantling that form of power.’ As attested to by past and ongoing forms of revolutionary mobilisation by those who have bee n treated as second-class citizens, many Tunisians have reached a similar conclusion."

"Over its modern history, the West has not permitted any Arab liberal [and democratic] experiment to succeed, since, to start with, it has not allowed an Arab bourgeoisie to grow independent of its control. This is the reason why the West has always sought the explicit alliance of patriarchal and theocratic societies which vehemently oppose secularism." — Ghālī Shukrī, Diktātoriyat al-takhalluf al-'arabī , Cairo, 1994.

When Fascism Was American The US hasn’t seen the stirrings of fascist mobilization since the late 1930s when mounting fascist victories in Europe galvanized its adherents in America, chief among them Father Charles Coughlin and his Christian Front. This history has something to offer us today.

Egypt: Sisi’s procession passing on red carpet in 6 October stirs anger

A physician, in order to be admitted to practice, must demonstrate his theoretical and practical knowledge of medicine. A politician, on the other hand, who, unlike the physician, purposes to decide the fate not of hundreds of people, but of millions, does not have to show such proof of knowledge. This fact seems to be one of the  fundamental reasons for the tragedy which, for thousands of years, has devastated human society with periodic outbreaks. The practical worker, no matter whether he comes from a rich or a poor home, has to go through a certain schooling. He is not elected "by the people." Working people who have proved themselves over years in their profession should determine whether or not the future worker should be a socially potent factor. This demand may be ahead of the facts, but it is indicative of a tendency. Every cobbler, carpenter, mechanic, electrician, mason, etc., has to fulfill very strict demands made on his abilities. A politician, on the other hand...