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Showing posts from May 28, 2023

When an Image Speaks Volumes

  Source: Le Monde Diplomatique

مؤلف "مدن الملح" و"شرق المتوسط"

  من أول الروايات التي قرأتُها وأثرت في تفكيري كثيرا، خاصة أنني شخصيا تعرضتُ لبعض التعذيب بعد سنوات قليلة من قرائتها،  كانت رواية منيف "شرق المتوسط". للأسف لم أقرأ "مدن الملح" بعد. عبد الرحمان منيف

Harka: a Review of a Tunisian Film

“Although the film cannot be simply categorised as working-class cinema - it is, after all, a commercial film intended primarily for a comparatively bourgeois international audience and international festivals - it is not bourgeois either. It clearly centres on the perspective of the urban, struggling poor, and it successfully imposes this viewpoint, rather than making a plea for it. The viewer is encouraged to empathise with Ali, but Ali is not rehabilitated for the bourgeois eye.” A man whose burning anger suggests little has changed for ordinary Tunisians

French in Algeria and Morocco

Algeria: Primary schools to teach English in 'overdue' move away from 'colonial' French French is on the verge of disappearing in Morocco “Algerian children will be left unable to academically master a single language due to the lack of provisions for this transition into English in schools.”  Moving from French to English won't resolve the country's problems

Henry Kissinger in the Middle East

Accessing the full review requires a subscription – an institutional subscription, for example. Apart from what is available, I have added the following: A factor that Indyk omits is the disdain Kissinger repeatedly demonstrated for Arab leaders (“pathetic,” “wily,” “uncouth,” “quixotic,” and “machismo-driven,” which is rich coming from him) and peoples (“mad,” their “ways” a mystery, above all in the Persian Gulf, home to “eight million savages”). Indyk dismisses it as mere “frat-boy talk.” Decades ago, journalist Seymour Hersh instead insisted that the racism of Kissinger and his two closest and most hard-core anti-communist sidekicks, Haig and Helmut Sonnenfeldt, was as entrenched as Nixon’s. This was true whether they were assessing the intelligence of the African Americans then rising through the ranks of the State Department (“Do you think he’ll understand the cables?”) or hosting Organization of African Unity officials (“I wonder what the dining room is going to smell like”). T

Russian Capitalism is Both Political and Normal

I think capitalism in Russia would be more accurate than Russian capitalism. “The narrative emphasising how the hybrid nature of the Russian state – neoliberal regulatory and statist interventionist – led it down the path to war in Ukraine, offers a fragmented (and misleading) explanation of reality. The problem is that the ideological and political features of the state are interpreted as exercised for purposes outside of capitalist accumulation – be it nationalism, patriarchy, racism, homophobia – conceived as separate systems of oppression from class.” On expropriation and social reproduction Related On the war and on internationalism The Development of Capitalism in Russia