Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Turkey: Atatürk statues attacked

"Baraka wasn’t concerned with whether white musicians imitate black musicians. His quarrel was with a society that allows some to rake in profits at the expense of others, a process that has consistently and aggressive." Why Culture Matters

The UK economy since 2007 — an economic record of comparative mediocrity

Capital expansion has no religion "The treatment of the Rohingya is sometimes described as a crime against humanity. But we need to interrogate its sources. If we bring in some of the larger trends affecting modest rural communities, two major facts stand out. One is the far larger numbers of Buddhist smallholders who have also been expelled from their land in the last few years. And the other is the fact that large-scale timber extraction, mining, and water projects are replacing the expelled." Is Rohingya persecution caused by business interests rather than religion?

The big data revolution can revive the planned economy

Back to university Verso student reading list

Yes. An Egyptian filmmaker is planning a rejoinder to the Hollywood blockbuster  American Sniper , with a film focusing on the "other side of the story" - the Iraqi fighter said to have killed dozens of American soldiers during the occupation. ' Iraqi Sniper': An Egyptian film-maker plans a response to American Sniper

الكتابة كفعل تحرري عند غسان كنفاني وإميل سيزار (Writing as a liberating act in the writings of Ghassan Kanafani and Aimé Césaire)

These regimes are human trash

Britain The middle-class academic elite is totally out of touch

Blackwater founder Erik Prince implicated in murder

If the "civilised" treat their own people in this way , then one should understand the indifference to the 400,000 Iraqi children or the similar number killed by a Syrian regime they did not want to remove. Or, the 500,000 to a million killed in a genocide in Rwanda. Mechanisms have included sanctions, aid, debt, celebrities "saving Africa and defending human rights" ... There are exceptions though when  there is a profit to make out of some people or a demographic need combined with hostorical guilt (Germany). In the mid-19th century British capitalism deliberately legalised opium trading in China that turned millions of Chinese into addicts and made British commerce huge profits. The Chinese fought an unsuccessful war against the British to stop the trade. Well, in the 21st century there is another legal opium trade operating in the heart of America. It has produced an opioid epidemic across working-class middle America. And it has been created by big pharm...

A nice interview Angela Davis on Black Lives Matter, Palestine and the Future of Radicalism

Iran: Free trade union leaders Reza and Ismail

Religion Fights Back From Fields of Blood — Religion and the History of Violence by Karen Armstrong

Politicians and pundits in the West, observes Zarni, long ago adopted Aung San Suu Kyi as “their liberal darling — petite, attractive, Oxford-educated ‘Oriental’ woman with the most prestigious pedigree, married to a white man, an Oxford don, connected with the British Establishment.” " Burmese nobel prize winner turned an apologist for genocide " (?) Those liberals and leftists who had a brilliant analysis of the regime in Burma and knew very well that the Lady broke up with the regime or that the regime was dismanteled.  Who else is a Nobel Prize winner that comes to my mind? Sadad of Egypt and Obama.  See also Earlier this year, when a team from the  United Nations Human Rights Commission carried out research  into alleged human rights violations in Rakhine state, it refused to use any photographs or video it had not taken itself, because of the problem of authenticating such material. Their report gives meticulous details of their methodology. ...

"Varoufakis explains how he gradually convinced Tsipras, Pappas, and Dragasakis not to follow the orientation adopted by Syriza in 2012, then in 2014. He explains that along with them, he worked out a new orientation that was not discussed within Syriza and was different from the one Syriza ran on during the January 2015 campaign. And that orientation was to lead, at best, to failure, and at worst to capitulation." Varoufakis Account of the Greek Crisis: A Self-Incrimination

After decades of robbery, plunder and selling of Arab oil on the cheap to the West, another big sell-off is coming. Heads must roll if the Arabs want to control their wealth. Saudi Arabia's big privatization plan to go head

Saudi Arabia is applying for a $10 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund!

" The post-67 radical movements in the Arab world can also be called 'creeping': no 'big nights,' no general strikes or coordinated revolution ..."  Actually, there were general strikes (in 1978 in Tunisia, for example) and there were "bread uprisings" in Tunisia and Egypt. The problems was that the left was already weak as a pole of attraction, the Islamist organization had attracted more members and had more money. The balance of forces was significantly in favour of the regimes (there were brutal and also supported by external powers to maintain stability). Despite their superiority, a few Islamist organisations either adapted to the regimes repression and containment or were crushed (Algeria with the help of the French), or both (i.e. they joined the regimes parliament in spite of being repressed, e.g. the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt). Also missing in the summary the blunder of the Iraqi Communist Party in the 1950s althought it was the bigg...

David Harvey's new book  Marx's Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason Event