Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Capitalism and workers struggle in China

Institutionalised Racism: A Syllabus 

Ramachandra Guha is wrong. Gandhi went from a racist young man to a racist middle-aged man

The twentieth-century question is back. We saw it in the Arab uprisings from Tunisia to Algeria and Sudan, in Occupy, in Greece, in France, etc. And we see it now in the U.S. " The rebellion [in the U.S.] has accomplished more in two weeks than have decades of slow, incremental electoralism." —Ahmed Kanna

Which tactics are appropriate for today’s rebellions can only be determined by a strategic and organizational analysis along the lines [Marin Luther] King proposed, and not according to the moral judgment which he subordinated to that analysis. In fact, with news that Los Angeles is considering cuts in police department funding, Minneapolis city council members openly considering disbanding the police force, and curfews being lifted in several cities, there are good reasons to believe that the current riots are strategically effective. “No justice, no peace,” from King’s vantage point, means that there is no positive peace without justice. Therefore in the context of injustice, there can be no negative peace, in the sense that there must be tension, there must be a “disturbance of the peace” in order to have the presence of justice. Today, when protestors shout “no justice, no peace,” we should understand this as a political principle which takes primacy over the abstract conceptio...

The question is: why have the British accepted statues of slave traders (and also killers for the Empire) for so long? Miseducation and ignorance, imperial pride, or indifference? Personally, I am against statues. I didn't like Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, for example, having one after his death. Hopefully, what is happening will provoke a dew British people to read the history of the British empire so they know theirs before poiting to Arab or Chinese histories and know that violence and plunder played a significant role in making "Great" Britain what it is today. After Colston, figures such as Drake and Peel could be next Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scouts movement The history of British slave ownership has been buried Related The Blood Never Dried by John Newsinger Inglorious Empire by Shashi Tharoor

"The dark star behind Brexit, without which it cannot be understood, remains the British people’s unreconciled relationship with the experience of empire. The empire is a huge and complicated subject that, to our enduring collective detriment, is barely taught and is thus also barely known and absorbed into public discourse. This is partly why Sunday was probably the first time that most people outside Bristol will ever have heard of Colston." — Martin Kettle, the Guardian

Who does coronavirus kill?

Returning to Normal?

Webinar – The “Arab Spring” Lives On: Uprisings in times of a pandemic Friday 12 June 2020 at 4pm  (CES T, Amsterdam time) . Register here:  https://bit.ly/3h7zrWk Ten years ago, the Arab uprisings were celebrated as world changing events. The emancipatory experience was so contagious that people were inspired all over the world. Occupiers from London to Wall Street and the Indignados were proud to “Walk like an Egyptian”. The revolutionary process that has swept North Africa and West Asia, driven by demands for bread, freedom, dignity and social justice, has seen ups and downs, gains and setbacks, which materialized in a liberal democratic transition in Tunisia and bloody counter-revolutions and imperialist interventions in other countries. This led some pundits to pronounce a death sentence on the so-called “Arab Spring”. A decade on, this protracted revolutionary process is well into the second wave of revolt, triggered by the same features of governance and po...

An excellent piece "The new black politicians, what the online news magazine Black Agenda Report accurately calls  the Black 'misleadership', would reap the benefits of the racist US system while selling it to the Black electorate as a 'free country' with some racial problems that could be remedied within the 'democratic' system. This background propelled Barack Obama to the forefront of political power in the 21st century." The American republic of white supremacy Related Joseph A. Massad is the author of Islam in Liberalism

"Britain isn't racist." The likes of Hancock and Johnson are unsurprisingly in denial. Johnson nuanced his opinion by saying that Britain is "much, much less racist" than the U.S, for example. Johnson and his ilk have also condemned the "thuggery" of those who pulled down Colston statue, saying that the protesters must have followed the right/legal channels, not taking direct action.   Actually, that's what the campaingers have done for years, but with no change. The campaign of Rhodes Must Fall is a case in point. -------- For the [Rhodes Must Fall] movement’s vocal critics, it has been commonplace to observe, euphemistically, that Rhodes was “a man of his time”, by way of suggesting that his time has nothing in common with our own. But if you replace the word “British” with “western” and “United Kingdom” with “the west”, you find this statement in his will encapsulates not only Rhodes’s vision but a vision of the world today, one that ha...

The 1871 Chinese Massare—The Worst Lunching in U.S. History

How a kidnapped aid worker who converted to Islam shook Italy

Riots could break out across the UK this summer over the effects of coronavirus, a scientific adviser has warned.  Professor Clifford Stott, a professor of social psychology at Keele University, said mass job losses, rising unemployment along with concerns about economic and racial inequality could spark "confrontations" in the coming months. A divide between poorer and more affluent areas brought on by possible local lockdowns could also have an effect, said Prof Stott, who sits on the government's Sage sub-committee on behaviour. "If the police don't invest in building positive police-community relations now, there is a potential for serious and large public disorder to emerge this summer," he told PA news agency. "I think in the worst case scenario it's not inconceivable that we could have disorder on a scale equivalent to August 2011," he said Source: the BBC online. Related Reading the Riots [of August 2011]

Donald Rumsfeld, US protests and the neoliberal hypocrites

New York Times' meltdown on Tom Cotton Related     Tel Aviv, Israel, 06 June 2020 Related Another deleted article by the New York Times: "The Harvey Weinstein of Islam"

How lives were destroyed under cover of lockdown

"Pierre Charbonnier demonstrated it: after a hundred years of socialism limited just to the redistribution of the benefits of the economy, it might now be more a matter of inventing a socialism that contests production itself . Injustice is not just about the redistribution of the fruits of progress, but about the very manner in which the planet is made fruitful . This does not mean de-growth, or living off love alone or fresh water. It means learning to select each segment of this so-called irreversible system, putting a question mark over each of its supposed indispensable connections, and then testing in more and more detail what is desirable and what has ceased to be so."  What protective measures can you think of so  we don't go back to the pre-crisis production model?

A poor country with very limited resources and an American embargo A successful programme to contain coronavirus

The real definition of "Private Property"

Symbols of crime and empire "The statue of 17th century slave trader Edward Colston , which was pulled down by anti-racism protestors in Bristol earlier, has been dumped in the River Avon. It had been situated in the city’s centre since 1895, and was subject to an 11,000-strong petition to have it removed." (Source: the Guardian online) There are many similar statues in Britain. Most Brits do not care about their existence. They have accepted Winston Churchill on a five-pound note, a statue of Henry Havelock in Traflagr Square and another of General Charles Gordon also in London. In a poll in the local newspaper, the  Bristol Post , in 2014 56 per cent of the 1,100 respondents said it [Colston's statue] should stay while 44 per cent wanted it to go. A comment by nwhithfield on the Guardian : Many cities in Europe have squares, roads, tunnels and so on named after figures from the 20th century, often done post war - Roosevelt, Kennedy, Eisenhower, and even John...

A good summary From Slavery to Mass Incarceration

Bruno Latour  What we need is not only to modify the system of production but to get out of it altogether. We should remember that this idea of framing everything in terms of the economy is a new thing in human history. The pandemic has shown us the economy is a very narrow and limited way of organising life and deciding who is important and who is not important. If I could change one thing, it would be to get out of the system of production and instead build a political ecology.   However, "the bad guys are better organised and clearer in knowing what they want. The war we are engaged in is a difficult one. It is not that we are powerless; it is that many of us don’t know how to react.