Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

How just one country and 9 products contribute to deforestation

Why economic recovery from coronavirus is widening the wealth gap

“Italy’s Sikh Slaves” Related Italy’s Migrant Boot Camp Raped, beaten, exploited

“While official anti-corruption campaigns are at best a PR exercise, the opposition’s drive to weed out corruption rests on the idea that corruption is an incidental addition to the system, which could be made to function more fairly and rationally without it. Yet this is to mistake a feature for a glitch: the orgies of illicit enrichment [Alexei] Navalny and others rightly attack are not simply a product of the personal greed of Putin’s colleagues, they are part of the system’s very architecture. Far from being an extraneous or incidental aspect of contemporary Russian capitalism, corruption has been built into it from the outset.” Russia’s appointed billionaires

1952-2020 An obituary

Available to watch here

The Democratic National Convention Private healthcare, imperialism and other things the Democrats support

Thousands of migrants denied help during pandemic Related BAME over 50s likely to be among poorest in England

Signs of alternative power with an opposition that doesn’t want to take power! Belarus on the brink: what now? And as Volodymyry Artiukh wrote : “  Police violence, the lack of central ideological and strategic leadership among the protesters, and the decentralized nature of the protests will determine their further development. At the same time, the ruling elite showed no signs of a split, the security apparatus and the bureaucracy generally remained loyal, although there have been signs of hesitation at the lower and regional levels (with several state media journalists and police officers resigning). There is no central coordination center of the protest, no local centers, no visible leaders on the street, no identifiable political groups. I believe that some already existing political groups are taking part in the protests, but they are not visible as separate ‘tactical units’: they are either disoriented, or deeply disguised, or participating as individuals.” Partis...

This is a very good piece. If your university/institution has a subscription with Taylor and Francis online, you should be able to access the article. Decolonizing the history of British women’s suffrage movement

This was written in April. No, Liberal Pundits: Biden Hasn’t Actually Been a Progressive All Along

Historian Raj Pal to the BBC: We have a myth of ‘Britannia rules the waves’ and making Britain ‘Great’, but we don’t want to address the fact that Britannia ruling the waves is to do with the slave trade, colonialism, empire and massacre, as well as trade in tobacco, sugar and salt. Almost a third of stately homes owned by the National Trust have links to slavery or colonialism...

A new publication The Sultan’s Communists: Moroccan Jews and the Politics of Belonging

The last communist to challenge Stalin to his face

When [sociologist] Zygmunt Bauman turned his attention to camps in the 90s, he argued that what characterises violence in our age is distance – not just the physical or geographical distance that technology allows, but the social and psychological distance produced by complex systems in which it seems everybody and nobody is complicit. This, for Bauman, works on three levels. First, actions are carried out by “a long chain of performers”, in which people are both givers and takers of orders. Second, everybody involved has a specific, focused job to perform. And third, the people affected hardly ever appear fully human to those within the system. “Modernity did not make people more cruel,” Bauman wrote, “it only invented a way in which cruel things could be done by non-cruel people.” Why are they still with us? Related In America: crammed into cells and forced to drink from the toilet

France’s Afghan fundamentalist heroes

State-sanctioned arbitrary killing of Morsi, say UN experts When someone mentions or appeals to “the international community”, do they mean this? The other day a British woman said we were a free country. Whatever her definition of freedom in capitalism is, could a country and its state that are complicit in crimes and oppression be free?