Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The energy transition in North Africa: neocolonialism again! التصدي للاستعمار الجديد في الانتقال الطاقي بشمال أفريقيا

The British colonisers caused the Bengal famine Related The trouble with the Engenglish is that their hiss hiss history happened overseas, so they dodo don’t know what it means. —Whisky Sisodia, in Salman Rushdie,  The Satanic Verses

A disappointing piece by Naomi Klein , I think. Klein, the critic of ‘neoliberal’ capitalism, fails in a long piece to include a couple of paragraphs analysing the political economy of Egypt in the broader regional and global capitalist relations. Instead, ‘human rights’, ‘civil society’ and the authoritarian regime occupy her analysis. The piece should have been ‘In solidarity with Alaa’.  The interactions of geopolitical powers and capitalist interests are completely absent. There is only a passing mention of ‘anti-capitalist politics’, but not the functioning of capital in Egypt, Israel, the UAE, the US, France, the UK, etc. Klein, who in  No Logo  ushered in a new generational critique of commodity culture, and who in  The Shock Doctrine  established herself as perhaps the most prominent North American critic of neoliberal disaster capitalism , signals that she has now, in  William Morris 's famous metaphor, crossed "the river of fire" to become a...

No accountability

A report by the BBC: Dozens were crushed to death at Spanish border

"Even though slavery was abolished, it truly was just a transfer of ownership from chattel slavery and private ownership to literally state-sanctioned slavery," says Savannah Eldrige from the Abolish Slavery National Network. "The United States of America has never had a day without codified slavery.”

“ There are too many whose idea of ‘critical’ is limited to saying some development was problematic but some was quite good, if only there had been more of that ‘good’ development. The most stunning imperial formation was that the War in Afghanistan was unquestionable–whether as an act of revenge and/or care (for Afghan women). The friend/enemy distinction has been marked on to women’s bodies playing out in a fundamentalist logic of either supporting education or not supporting education, supporting the Taliban or condemning them. The Kite Runner  made everyone feel they knew Afghanistan. Like white people who watched the TV serial  The Wire  that came out about the same time as the beginning of the US war and occupation of Afghanistan.  Suddenly white liberals felt they knew the deep struggles of racialized people in Baltimore, and elsewhere, because they watched  The Wire , and liked the character Omar. The critique was only of the withdrawal, not of the ...

Fellow Citizens A wicked and unjust war is now being waged by the ruling and propertied classes of this country, with all the resources of civilisation at their back, against an ill-armed and semi-barbarous people whose only crime is that they have risen against a foreign oppression which those classes themselves admit to have been infamous. Tens of millions wrung from the labour of workmen of this country are being squandered on Arab slaughtering; and for what: 1) that Eastern Africa may be ‘opened up’ to the purveyor of ‘shoddy’ wares, bad spirits, venereal disease, cheap bibles and the missionary; in short, that the English trader and contractor may establish his dominion on the ruins of the old, simple and happy life led by the children of the desert; 2) that a fresh supply of sinecure Government posts may be obtained for the occupation of the younger sons of the official classes; 3) as a minor consideration may be added that a new and happy hunting ground be provided for military ...

 Baraye 70 feminist reasons