Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“It took just a few years after the US withdrew from Vietnam for some great films to arrive, including Apocalypse Now (1979) and The Deer Hunter (1978). The Covenant and other tentative responses suggest that while filmmakers are now setting their stories in Afghanistan, coming to grips with that conflict on screen may take a lot longer. The Hollywood landscape is more cautious than ever today, and the US too politically divided for movies to risk alienating half the audience.” State terrorism is represented as a victim or a hero.  Kandahar (released in the US on 26 May) is a Gerard Butler action movie about a CIA operative trapped in a dangerous part of Afghanistan with his interpreter. The trailer shows Butler saying "Nobody's coming to save us", a cue for the two of them to battle the enemies and save each other.” “Most films about battles in Iraq and Afghanistan are determinedly apolitical, praising the heroism of the soldiers as a way of sidestepping deeper issues ab...

The best approach I have seen so far to what is happening in Sudan. Gunshots in Khartoum

I wouldn’t use the word ‘mistake’ in the title; as the writer elaborates in the article , it was rather a weakness that stems of the absence of a well-organised revolutionary organisation. In fact, insurrection stopped short of taking the levers of powers. There was not an open general strike to pose the question of power.  “Despite the revolutionaries’ battlefield triumph, little was achieved at the structural level in the centuries-long popular fight against the police state. Unlike what happened with the Stasi in East Germany after the 1989 revolution, Egyptians still know very little about the SSI [the State Security Investigation Service]. The problem for those rebelling against Egypt’s police state was primarily their limited capacity—as well as lack of a strategy and the necessary political imagination. The liberal human rights discourse also reduced the police state to a problem of its repression and illegality, preventing a deeper understanding of its constructive role, it...