Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

[Upon] closer scrutiny, the operation of retrieving, commemorating and mourning proves to be deeply problematic and hypocritical. For this tragic loss of life was not an unfortunate “accident” but the result of political decisions taken, amongst others, by the very state actors who are now claiming a high moral ground by recovering and mourning the dead. The forgotten 22,000 First of all, the 18th of April shipwreck is only one among many more incidents that have led to more than 22,000 documented deaths at sea over the last 25 years. These have been the structural product of EU migration policies that have denied legal access to EU territory to the impoverished citizens of the global South since the end of the 1980s. The militarization of border controls and their externalization to North African states has forced migrants wishing to reach EU territory to resort to smugglers and to take longer and ever more dangerous routes. Italy, as a “frontline” state of the EU...

From my flickr collections   (a 2010-photo)

“Every industrial and commercial centre in England possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life … This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes.” " If remain had won, we would already have returned to pretending that everything was carrying on just fine. Those people who have been forgotten would have stayed forgotten; those communities that have been abandoned would have stayed invisible to all but those who live in them. To insist that they will now suffer most ignores the fact that unless something had changed, they were going to suffer anyway. Those on the remain side who felt they didn’t recognise their own country when they woke up on Friday morning must spare a thought for the pensioner in Redcar o...

Modern imperialism and the working class

Poll: UK Class Divide is 'Alive and Well'

One click at a time

Life's Longing for Itself: The Art of Adnan Yahya,  An essay by Will Cloughley, MFA (Jan 2016)

Another amusing headline from foreignpolicy.com (27 June 2016) " Years after promising democratic reforms, Bahrain’s government is going after its critics with a new vigor. Yet Britain and the United States are doing nothing about it,"

Article Why the British Establishment Wants Jeremy Corbyn Buried Video

"Its perhaps understandable why xenophobic rhetoric appealed to some Brexit supporters.  Resolution’s Bell  found that even though pro-Brexit voters weren't from places that had  ​recently  gotten poorer since the mass immigration wave, they were from places that had  ​historically  been poor — going back to the 1980s. These people have good reasons to be angry about the status quo. They’re looking for someone to blame, and immigrants are an easy scapegoat." "Irrational Xenophobia, not Real Economic Grievances" Here is what is missing in the analysis above: Support for UKIP "is even higher among the self-employed and business owners than the working class, and that is quite high even in the professional and managerial classes, who because are their substantial numbers actually provide the biggest bloc of UKIP’s class-based support . For all of these reasons the Conservatives, not Labour, have most to fear from UKIP ... Working class voters are a li...

Spain: Further Stalmate

  One should always keep the bigger picture in mind and not get dragged into the swamp of the mainstream discourse, repeated ad nauseum. Yes, there is the social factor resulting from the economic crisis and the failure of decades of economic policies, but geo-politics too has played a major role. Terrorism, individual or state terrorism, financial terrorism, austerity, racism, wars, social dislocation and marginalization, imperialist reality (mainly Western 'invasions/bombings'), and imperialist nostalgia (e.g. Hilary Benn), the Brexit vote, etc... are all manifestations of a general global crisis of a system, a consensus defended by the liberals, the conservatives and the mainstream left, prolongued by the general passivity and indifference of the people, who accept the existing power structure and power relations and, occasionally, express themselves within those same frameworks of power through the voting process, believing in "democracy". So they vote for thi...