Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The strange story of how a legendary investigative journalist came to echo Assad's propaganda

"here’s what might surprise you, if you’ve read too much liberal academic bullshit about the “white working class". Opposition to Brexit, and the xenophobia that’s come with it, was strong in Durham. This was mainly white, working class people refusing to adopt the reactionary identity of the “white working class”, invented by liberal pundits in response to Trump." The labour movement and Brexit

An on-going Who picked up my tea? Background: a BBC report

Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman

Review of Geoffrey B. Robinson,  The Killing Season. A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965 – 66 (Princeton University Press, 2018)

"Technology development became less a story of collective flourishing than personal survival. Worse, as I learned, to call attention to any of this was to unintentionally cast oneself as an enemy of the market or an anti-technology curmudgeon." Survival of the richest Related Elysium

I have just finished reading Late Victorian Holocausts El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World It is an execellent book .  Some passages in chapter 8 are not easy and require some scientific knowledge of the field, but most of the book is a very good read.

A critique of solidarity

Educating Britain Suffragettes on the BBC:  Omission/filtering/sanitisation: It is scary to know that prominent Suffragettes were socialists. The BBC is celebrating 100 years since women over 30 and "who met minimum property qualifications" won the right to vote in Britain. I have gone through these three pieces and I have noticed deliberate ommision of what is an integral part of some prominent Suffragettes and the Suffragettes movement: socialism, communism, the Independent Labour Party.   Sylvia Pankhurst  is described as "a  vocal pacifist, anti-fascist and anti-colonialist activist."   In   this introduction (click "more"), and  this one ( recommended to teachers!) claims to be tracing "the history of women's movement in Britain" and "how women won the right to vote. Now, compare the above with Emily Davison   "was a  staunch feminist and passionate Christian , and considered that  socialism  was a moral an...

“This is the supposed ‘natural condition’ of mankind, in which everyone is at war with everyone else, much as Thomas Hobbes described in his ‘Leviathan’, during the middle of the seventeenth century. But the state of nature is not in fact a ‘natural’ condition; it is a historical conjuncture”  Notes on Syria and the Coming Global Thanatocracy

"Johnson’s command of detail when it comes to his projecting himself is unmatched. The would-be leader of the country’s independence revolution is a narcissus who sees no further than his own reflection. The shine is wearing off, however. Most papers declined to act as his mirror. Mogg "is an extraordinarily wealthy hedge fund speculator who has made tens of millions without the ability to sharpen a pencil let alone manufacture one." A halitosis of a rotting body politic

Learn the Danish values or ...

We know the American war crimes in Iraq, but We may never know if the British committed war crimes there Why? Because the British forces are (almost) perfect.  The last person in Britain to be prosecuted for crimes committed by forces under their command was in 1651 during the civil war.

Rodinson "mobilised Ouzegane’s point of being less concerned about whether Muslim dogmas were true or false, than with seeing Islam principally as a social and political instrument... Rodinson considered Islam as neither a good nor a bad ideology a priori, but rather insisted on the need to produce analyses of the religion that account for its social conditions in which it developed. As he wrote at the beginning of the his book  De Pythagore à Lénine , ‘the best way to comprehend nothing of a phenomenon is to isolate it, and to consider it, from either the interior or the exterior, as if it is the only one of its type." The Thinker and the Militant