Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Another indictment of the "International Criminal Fund" “We are not poor but were made poor, this is your policy, oh dollar” ( Mish faqir lakin ifqar, hatha nahjak ya dular ). This understanding of corruption is in stark contrast to notions of corruption which depict the main problem of postcolonial states in the global South as one of corrupt individuals, rather than global economic structures that keep elites, leaders and policies which harm their populations. Framed this way, the problem is mismanagement rather than (deliberate) structures that benefit the elite at the expense of the majority." Do you know who governs us? The damned Monetray Fund Essential reading: Debt, IMF, and the World Bank  by Eric Toussaint and Damien Millet, 2010

"Class is everywhere, impossible to escape or even look away from, but it is still unusual for politicians or commentators to call it by name. In a class-ridden society, Americans often manage to dodge the issue." "The remaking of class"

Warning : do not read this if you are eating or about to eat, going to bed, or going to make love. This happened between 1952-1956, not in the nineteenth century. "Interrogation under torture was widespread. Many of the men were anally raped, using knives, broken bottles, rifle barrels, snakes and scorpions. A favourite technique was to hold a man upside down, his head in a bucket of water, while sand was rammed into his rectum with a stick. Women were gang-raped by the guards. People were mauled by dogs and electrocuted. The British devised a special tool which they used for first crushing and then ripping off testicles. They used pliers to mutilate women’s breasts. They cut off inmates’ ears and fingers and gouged out their eyes. They dragged people behind Land Rovers until their bodies disintegrated. Men were rolled up in barbed wire and kicked around the compound."  — Caroline Elkins, Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya , 2005 An update from Elkins...

"It is also important to recognise that the stories we consume are, for the most part, commodities produced by profit-making companies. Like other commodities, their production, value and demand are driven by market forces. This can harm those at the centre of the stories, distort our understanding of a crisis and even contribute to a sense of panic – which, in turn, provokes panicked responses from the authorities." Rather than seeing European racism as a thing of the past, the recognition of its persistence is essential if we are to understand the refugee crisis and some of the responses to it. Thousands of people from former European colonies, whose grandparents were treated as less than human by their European rulers, have drowned in the Mediterranean in the past two decades, yet this only became a “crisis” when the scale of the disaster was impossible for Europeans to ignore. 5 myths about the refugee crisis

Justice If you earn £25000/year before tax, it takes the Brazilian player Neymar 6 minutes to earn your weekly salary ! May be it is worth it. A footballer entertains us and makes us happy; he might even help us release some orgasmic energy!  In doing that, he is more useful to society than a nurse or a cleaner.

"Je suis Capital Gazette" (?) Anyone?

"what’s happening today marks a dangerous new development in European politics. Until now, the effort to filter out and deter unwanted migrants from reaching  Europe  has generally been pursued by politicians of the liberal centre, and part of their justification for doing it is that these unpleasant but necessary policies will stave off a rightwing populist backlash." The irrational fear of migrants ... But is it really irrational?

Critical history is theorized history.  It does not treat “theory” as an isolated corpus of texts or body of knowledge. Nor does it treat theory as a separate, non-historical form, of knowledge. Rather, it regards theory as a worldly practice (and historical artifact). The point is not for historians to become theorists; theory for theory’s sake is as bankrupt as the idea that facts can “speak for themselves.” The point is for disciplinary history to overcome its guild mentality (disciplinary essentialism) and empiricist methodology (methodological fetishism) — to interrogate its “commonsense” assumptions about evidence and reality, subjectivity and agency, context and causality, chronology and temporality. This would require serious engagement with critical theories of self, society, and history. Theses on Theory and History

"Trial runs for fascism are in full flow" Exageration? 

UK The business of this country is business. "I'm a trade unionist, not a terrorist" 

New York congressional primary

"The current UK government nevertheless continues to drive outsourcing into the state’s most complex and socially essential service domains. It’s enough to make Leonid Brezhnev blush." "Why public sector outsourcing is less efficient than Soviet planning"

At the British Library, London Sex, Botany and Empire

Britain The historical gain that the fundamentalists have not privatised yet. Or, they have partially privatised, along with a steady creation of private healthcare. Imagine how much profit a Branson could make if it is given to him and thus he speeds up  commercial travels to space!

The consevatives and the oppressors of yesteryear, portray themselves and teach their children today that they are pioneers of "liberation and freedoms." "(Southern Indian women, whose breasts were traditionally uncovered, found themselves obliged to undergo the indignity of conforming to Victorian standards of morality; soon the right to cover one's breasts became a marker of upper-cast respectability and efforts were made to deny this privilege to lower-caste women, leading to such missionary-inspired colonial curiosities as the Breast Cloth Agitation from 1813 to 1859 in Travancore and Madras Presidency.)"  The Indian Penal Code, "drafted by the British imperial rulers in the mid-nineteenth century criminalizes homosexuality under Section 377; creates a crime of 'sedition' under which students shouting slogans have been arrested; and applies a double standard to the commission of adultery."  "The irony is that in India there has ...

Excellent! A must read. " ‘The deterioration of the intelligentsia,’ Arthur Koestler wrote, ‘is as much a symptom of disease as the corruption of the ruling class or the sleeping sickness of the proletariat. They are symptoms of the same fundamental process.’ One clear sign of intellectual infirmity is the desperation with which centrists and liberals, removed from the cockpit of American power, forage for ideas and inspiration on the lumpen right.  What differentiated the Western model from many Asian, African and Latin American networks of women’s groups and indigenous peoples, or alternative development and environmental organisations, was its indifference to ‘economic and social rights’: what Moyn defines as ‘entitlements to work, education, social assistance, health, housing, food and water’. Focusing on the violations of individuals’ rights by states, human rights groups valuably documented the crimes of the Contras in Nicaragua, the army and death squads in El Salvador,...

" Turkey has been under a state of emergency since a failed coup in July 2016, with 107,000 public servants and soldiers dismissed from their jobs. More than 50,000 people have been imprisoned pending trial since the uprising." The BBC is lost in translation. In the very same paragraph , "coup" and "uprising" were used to mean the same thing. We know that what happened in 2016 was a coup and the major Western powers were slow to condemn it. They played watch-and-see first. In these elections, the HDP has scored above the 10% threshold that will aloow it to enter parliament despite its leader being in prison. The 2016 coup: an analysis by Stratfor "Regardless of whether Erdogan is at its helm, Turkey will continue down its expansionist path, a path that was unlikely to be short-circuited by a haphazard coup led by a motley group of Islamists and nationalists. Turkey is on this course, at this stage in history, because geopolitics wills it. B...

A photograph by Hadeer Mahmoud, Cairo Metro, 07 April 2016

Grenfell Tower (the residential tower in London, which was destroyed by fire in June 2017, resulting in 71 deaths) is named after Francis Grenfell , a murderer and Marshal who served in committing crimes in Egypt and South Africa and other colonies of the British Empire. One should be proud of tens of names which adorn public places in England!

"Ultimately, the greatest power of Fahmy’s adaptation is its ability to provide the audience with few obvious escape points, fewer firm assumptions to which to return safely. Even the characters’ best dreams for themselves seem illusory, almost ill-gotten. “Let us get out of Cairo. Out of the Yacoubian Building,” Busayna muses to Zaki, “we’ll be free. We’ll be together.” But few in this world have the luxury of escaping their own history: that history lives above you, works at your feet, sticks to you like the residue of centuries, and is liable to kill you in the end." A new adaptation of the Yacoubian Building