Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The asylum detainee who shot a film in secret

" Andy Merrifield’s The Amateur is a quite different beast. Merrifield is a leftwing “urbanist” whose thinking has been influenced both by obvious figures (Marx and Weber) and more unexpected ones (Baudelaire and Kafka). The Amateur is an old-style polemic arguing that many ills of the modern world (inequality, rising levels of stress and depression) stem from the increased specialisation of knowledge — or what Merrifield calls the “professional” mindset. He advocates instead a return to amateurism — which he defines as the pursuit of ideas for their own sake, and the freedom to roam promiscuously between disciplines." See also this FT article on the 'gig economy'

Blood and treasure: Egypt's army See also  what Trump said when he met Al-Sisi

Brazil's first general strike in 31 years

Violence: theirs and ours

"the void of intimacy and the powerful distraction of our tech devices."

The remarkable career of Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Chinese capital, the US and Germany

How mainstream racism, the racism of the establishment, in France, made Le Pen's racism manistream, and helped her get into the second round of the elections. "Go back to September 1984, when the Socialist prime minister, Laurent Fabius,  told a TV interviewer  that the elder Le Pen, a card-carrying racist and neo-fascist, was posing the right questions but giving the wrong answers. A few years later, the Socialist president, Francois Mitterrand, declared that France had reached a  “threshold of tolerance”  in terms of the impact of immigrants. In 1991, after  clashes  broke out between French police and youths of Arab and North African descent, politicians from the left, right, and center fell over one another to denounce immigration and bash French Muslims. In June of that year, for example, it wasn’t the elder Le Pen who decried an “overdose” of immigrants who brought to France “three or four wives, some 20 children,” plus “noise” and “smell.” It w...

Here is what Tony Benn said about the Guardian newspaper (slide to read)

The Average Black Family Would Need 228 Years to Build the Wealth of a White Family Today

" The ruling class supports Macron because he can help transform the Fifth Republic’s political-institutional system and preserve its capacity to dictate government policy in the years ahead. Macron’s election would radically realign French politics, clearing the way for a reform agenda that has faced numerous obstacles over the past twenty years.  M acron belongs to the inner circle of the French ruling class, what Pierre Bourdieu dubbed the “ state nobility .” A number of sociologists, from  Ezra Suleiman  to  Pierre Birnbaum , have demonstrated that these high-ranking civil servants constitute the most powerful social group in France."

You fool! I wouldn't ask a criminal imperialist state for an apology

"How Germany used Islam during World War I"

"U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres said nearly 19 million people, or two-thirds of Yemen's population, needed emergency aid. One child under the age of five dies of preventable causes every 10 minutes, he said." (Reuters) It is more exciting to follow the French elections! Or Their children and ours Britain and other states sells weapons to Saudi Arabic. The latter is using them in Yemen.

AS:  I take your point, and clearly Europe to did see, as you call it, a great ‘sorting-out’, but of course that term as you’re using it describes a set of  different processes – or, I should say, historical events and catastrophes – ranging from the Final Solution, the extermination of European jewry to the ethnic cleansing that took place at the very end of and in the aftermath of the Second World War. But what all these events share is that they’re are not a sorting-out of primordial identities so much as they are political events, driven by war, state interests, racial ideology, etc. And so to bring the conversation back to the Middle East, I think there is, unfortunately, a danger in the West’s conversation about sectarian warfare, to treat these identities as if they were primordial and as if this conflict that we’ve been seeing in Iraq and Syria is somehow natural, this sorting-out is a natural process, when in fact Syrian and Iraqi Sunni and Shia Muslims and Christia...

A very interesting book. And what has made it more interesting is this review in the Financial Times (a very revolutionary socialist website!) So long as we persist in our tendency to hive off the study of economics from politics, philosophy and journalism, Marx, will remain the outstanding example of how to overcome the frangmentation of modern social thought and think about the world as a whole for the sake of its betterment. — Mark Mazwoer, Columbia University, reviewing Gareth Stedman Jones's book Karl Marx, Greatness and Illusion , the Financial Times, August 5 2016 My comment: the fragmentation of social thought is not an accident; it is part and parcel of the substance of the dominant ideological thought which manifests itself, for example, in the academic sphere and how subjects of studies have been fragmented and delivered. That has a lot to do with the capitalist market and its relationship to reproduction of ideas and commodities.

China bans some Muslim names for newborns in Xinjiang (FT)

A heartfelt apology to Haaretz readers

This is very good! From Somerdale to Skarbimierz

“ This will repeat in other places ,” Dr. Monzer Khalil, a health official in rebel-held Idlib, said a day after treating victims of the recent chemical attack. “If Europe and America are honest, to preserve the values they are defending, they should fight this oppression. There should be political pressure on the regime.” >> One of many ways to perpetuate oppression is for "the oppressed people" themselves, consciously or unsonciously, to believe in crap.

"Populism in Iran shares much with populisms elsewhere in the world. It looks radical from outside, but its inner core is conservative. The obvious difference between present-day populism in the United States and in Iran is that while the former is a threat to the whole planet, the latter is a detriment mostly to its own people." Iran's Past and Present: An inteview with Ervand Abrahamian

The most justified social protest in Israel

When was America great?

France The best dissection I've read so far: Landscape of treason

Sex for rent? and London letting agents 'refuse black tenants'

Afghanistan When ones mentions Taliban, it seems that almost everybody has heard of them, but very few people would know how many times Western imperialist armies, and other armies, have interefed in Afghanistan, and the scale of destruction and instability those powers have left in the process. The British now have been defeated for the fourth time (incompetence of the "civilized to civilize" the recalcitrant? The Russians were also defeated, very badly. A defeat, let's not forget, that was helped by the Americans. The Americans and their allies have been defeated after the longest oocupation by the US imperialism, without establishing "peace", "democracy", or "liberating women", dogs, and the unfit in general. "For many decades during its recent past, when it was left alone, Afghanistan was one of the most peaceful and stable countries. History shows that what Afghanistan needs is less foreign interference, not more of it....

" Colonialism as a form of violent foreign rule was legitimised by a racist ideology of European superiority ,’ says the board that greets you at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin." And so does interventions (military or otherwise today). They are ligitimised by "defending our values and way of life", "liberating women", "figting terrorism", "defeding gay peopleand "reforming Islam" Besides the colonial legacy, fundamental features of global capitalism are being avoided by those who point to colonialism. Uneven and combined development, exploitaion, domination of finance capital and class, international institutions, debt, aid, NGOs, etc are playing crucial role in perpetuating national domination as well as the global one.

Reassessing Foucault: Modern Sexuality and the Transition to Capitalism