Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Labour's manifesto

Looking at West Bank map , one should observe how cancer has been eating out Palestinian land and their livelihood and stripping them of their dignity, emprisoning a whole people for decades in the biggest prison in the world and kills those who resist with impunity. It is not only about the pace of the spread of this cancer; it is its unstoppable speead and effectiveness. A pace accelerated by an international favourable environment, especially in the core imperialist states led by a gangster and a normalisation pursued by some Arab regimes.

Europe's coloniality persists after the fall of empire

Film review: Black 47 I recall what Shashi Thahroor said abour famines in India. Since the British left India in 1947, there has been no famine. "As a result of what one can only call the British Colonial Holocaust, thanks to economic policies ruthlessly enforced by Britain, between 30 and 35 million Indians needlessly died of starvation during the Raj. Millions of tonnes of wheat were exported from India to Britain even as famine raged. When relief camps were set up, the inhabitants were barely fed and nearly all died. "It is striking that the last large-scale famine to take place in India was under British rule; none has taken place since, because Indian democracy has been more responsive to the needs of drought-affected and poverty-stricken Indian than the British rulers ever were."  Inglorious Empire, 2017, p. 150

China's internal colony

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch

The economics of modern imperialism It would better to speak of the political economy of modern imperialism.

"A tiny bit of advice to Evo Morales' critics on the far left: always remember that he was removed by a police/military operation orchestrated by Washington NOT because of the mistakes but because of all the good things that were done and making Bolivia a country where the majority of citizens won political representation for the first time! Bolivia became sovereign and broke off relations with Israel (together with Venezuela) after one of the numerous massacres in Gaza. This is something that neither Turkey nor Egypt could do. Worth a thought. With mass mobilisations against the regime-change and the sovereign Bolivian parliament refusing to recognise the new President, the US victory might not last too long." —Tariq Ali, 16 November 2019 I hope so.

Libya through Italian eyes

Former President of Ecuador Raphael Correa:  "Clearly what happened in Bolivia was a coup." I am puzzeled though when he said there was no corruption in the United States or that he loved the the U.S. What does loving an imperialist and very unequal country mean? A country that is rife with  justice at home and it is policing global injustice!

"A coup is a curious thing. Those who make the coup never admit that they have made the coup. They claim that they are restoring democracy or that they are taking extraordinary means to establish the conditions – eventually – for democracy. This is precisely why the definition of the events are so fraught. But all coups are not the same. There are at least two types of military coups – the  General’s Coup  and the  Colonel’s Coup ." "Bolivia does not exist"

My own experience confirms this.  I recall what a new colleague of mine, a white British man, told me about "human rights" in 2011. “It’s hard not to feel like the government is doing it deliberately, not just to create a hostile environment for people who are here ‘illegally’ but [also] to make it more difficult for people supporting them … and I think everyone anticipates that at some point there will be legislation deliberately aimed at the organisations that support, for example, undocumented people, to make it more difficult for them to be accommodated and to make it more difficult for people to get advice.” How UK immigration system is geared to reject Related: G4S in Qatar and the UAE

"Operation Northmoor was set up by the government in 2014 and looked into 52 alleged illegal killings. Its closure was announced by the government before Royal Military Police detectives even had a chance to interview the key Afghan witnesses." This is very interesting. Language and selectivity by a corporate machine are two of the tools that reflect power relations within an imperialist state (e.g. PR) and in its relation to other states. The BBC article doen't even allude that the British regime and the military were in Afghanistan and Iraq as an ally with the American-led mission to fight "the terrorists" and "liberate" the people (in Afghanistan, especially women). What happened after that and the chaos left until the present day was not the responsibility of the coalition forces. "We did our bit." The "illegal killings" or "war crimes" must have occured in "very hard conditions" and "highly ...