Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Survivor: Life After Cluster Bomb

"Scholars schooled in the Western canon, but who are ideologically and methodologically anti-imperialist, often struggle with Conrad’s beautiful writing yet horribly racist views. Conrad was honest about the colonial brutalities he witnessed, but his admiration for empire is hardly hidden. Several European writers suffer such ambivalence. George Orwell’s Burmese Days, or his essay “Shooting an Elephant,” are examples: the reality of imperialism is dirty, possibly immoral, but the work must be done and empire must be defended. E. M Forster’s Passage to India and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim can also be mined for such ambiguities and complexities. But isn’t it time to stop feeling ambivalent about empire? Why are we again and again attracted to this ambivalence when the proof of empire’s destructive and dehumanizing power is all around us?" Empire and ambivalence

Germany "The AfD is not classically fascist – and does not need to be. Hitler needed his stormtroopers to take on and defeat the most organised labour movement, and biggest communist party, in Europe – and he did so amid double-digit unemployment. But to construct the essential alliance between the “elite and the mob” –  as Hannah Arendt described it  – the AfD just needs to go on normalising hate-speech, recruiting well-heeled people from business and the military, and disrupting the status quo."

Politics at the tip of the clitoris

The Russian Revolution 100 years on Uneven and Combined Development (Part 1) The full analysis   (91 pages) My reading for this week-end 

England The fat cats have got their claws into our universities The worst place to grow up poor

Legal prostitution in Tunisia البغاء القانوني في تونس

It looks an interesting book. The Violent American Century

Seventy Years of The New York Times Describing Saudi Royals as Reformers

Fawzy al-Qawuqji

Alliance of Middle East Socialists - a founding statement I have no problem with the statement, but the overwhelming majority of the foundrs are not in the Middle East!

Libya: Nermin Al-Sharif

The Arab poet who worshipped wine and fornication with women and boys.

I am reading Debt, the IMF and the World Bank by Éric Toussaint and Damien Millet. It is an indictment of the IMF as an international criminal organisation of enslavement. "Following the exigencies of the governments of the richest companies, the IMF, permitted countries in crisis to borrow in order to avoid default on their repayments. Caught in the debt's downward spiral, developing countries soon had no other recourse than to take on new debt in order to repay the old debt. Before providing them with new loans, at higher interest rates, future leaders asked the IMF, to intervene with the guarantee of ulterior reimbursement, asking for a signed agreement with the said countries. The IMF  thus agreed to restart the flow of the 'finance pump' on condition that the concerned countries first use this money to reimburse banks and other private lenders, while restructuring their economy at the IMF's discretion: these were the famous conditionalities, detailed in th...

Malala: The West's Unsaved Others and Do Muslim Women Need Saving?

In Iraq, as in the Philippines, as in U.S. occupied Haiti in 1914, we hear echoes of the words of Massachusetts Bay colony founder John Winthrop. The English had come to expropriate native land and resources, but somehow convinced themselves that their presence was benign. “So as God hath thereby cleared our title to this place, those who remain in these parts…have put themselves under our protection," said the Pilgrim-in-Chief. Throughout the Middle East and in spreading regions of the globe, the U.S. invites the natives to a “feast” of “democracy” – at the point of a gun. Frustrated at native unwillingness to dine on the corpses of their own national sovereignty, the Americans threaten to punish those who demonstrate such “unthankfulness.” In these times, we should remember the unthankful Pequot women and children roasting in the flames of their village, and the Wampanoag man, murdered by the Pilgrim saint Miles Standish, whose spiked head was displayed for years in Pl...