Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Britain's persistent racism cannot simply explained by its imeprial history Related: Britain: imperial nostalgia

"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

Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

“A German student has to  learn about the Holocaust , so, too, should every British student understand and face  Britain’s role in colonialism  and slavery." "It's time we're taught the downsides of our past in order to stop mistakes being repeated." (!) This is naïve. The Empire's plunder, subjugation and atrocities were not "mistakes." They were integral of the political economy of an empire. Read all about it Suggested reading: The Blood Never Dried by John Newsinger Inglorious Empire by Shashi Thahroor British Gulag (the British empire in Kenya)   by Caroline Elkins

Film review: Black 47 I recall what Shashi Thahroor said abour famines in India. Since the British left India in 1947, there has been no famine. "As a result of what one can only call the British Colonial Holocaust, thanks to economic policies ruthlessly enforced by Britain, between 30 and 35 million Indians needlessly died of starvation during the Raj. Millions of tonnes of wheat were exported from India to Britain even as famine raged. When relief camps were set up, the inhabitants were barely fed and nearly all died. "It is striking that the last large-scale famine to take place in India was under British rule; none has taken place since, because Indian democracy has been more responsive to the needs of drought-affected and poverty-stricken Indian than the British rulers ever were."  Inglorious Empire, 2017, p. 150

The 'end' of a war that was supposed to end all wars laid the foundations of the biggest slaughter in human history, WWII, when it imposed a humiliating and crippling treaty on Germany, a humiliation that was coupled with the impacts of the Great Depression, spawning the Nazis, who wanted a place under the sun, and propelled the U.S. to occupy a hegemonic place and displace the old empires. "The structural reality is that the First World War took place over empires, for empires, and between empires. For a clear-eyed portrait of the world that it yielded, there is no better place to start than the opening chapter of Dominic Lieven’s study of Tsarist Russia’s road to war,  To the Flame , the latest major contribution to the scholarship of the conflict. In it, Lieven lays out the codes and aims of conduct shared by the ruling classes of Europe, saturated with considerations of honour, prestige and virility, for whom territorial aggrandizement was an automatic criterion of ...

Britain "It was conflict inside the Tory party that led to the current political paralysis, a fact that Johnson wants the public to forget. In an insightful TV documentary made by the former Tory Minister Michael Portillo, party grandees explain that the Tory party is the oldest and most successful ruling party in the world. It ruled before the majority of British people had the right to vote, and it crystalized its power and philosophy in the period of an expanding British Empire.  However, as the Empire ended in the wake of two world wars, the British ruling class, its elite school networks, its aristocracy, its landowners, its bankers, and its large capitalist barons, could no longer rule in the old way. And during the same period popular reverence and respect for the elite faded away.  After WWII, British capitalism was forced to submit to the sway of American global power. Britain became the staunchest U.S. ally and pursued economic policies that came to be kno...

A bombastic champion of the British empire, UK's 20th Etonian Prime Minister, a hop-ium supplier, now a hero in the tabloid, a representative of arrogance amd chauvinism ... Another outcome of years of mediocrity, celebrity-entertainment, and complicity. Boris Johnson: Gaffeur, entertainer, Brexiteer, Premier

An alternative to Emmeline Pankhurst , a defender of the British Empire, celebrated by the London School of Economics and Manchester City Council. Freda Bedi

"The British never had the capacity to reshape coercively the internal arrangements of other capitalist  states. Their speciality was taking over and reshaping pre-capitalist societies, defeating traditionalist forces of resistance within them. So the principle of absolute states’ rights and non-interference was perfectly acceptable to the British, once they had reached the limits of their empire.  But Washington had a different and more advanced agenda: first, to penetrate existing capitalist states and reorganize their internal arrangements to suit US  purposes; and second, to defeat any social forces there that rejected the American path to modernity in the name, not of traditionalism, but of an alternative modernity. The UN model simply did not address these issues which were so central for Washington. Indeed, it offered a notional defence against American interference in its emphasis on national sovereignty. As a result, the UN politico-legal order was a cumbersom...

"Unless we, as a government, are prepared to act vigourously and take strong measures to combat the insidious propaganda of the extremists we are bound to have something very like rebellion in India before long... You say what you like about not holding India by the sword, but you have held it by the sword for 100 years and when you give up the sword you will be turned out. You must keep the sword ready to hand and in case of trouble or rebellion use it relentlessly. [Edwin Samuel] Montagu calls it terrorism, so it is and in dealing with natives of all classes you have to use terrorism whether you like it or not." —General Henry Rawlinson, commander-in-chief in India, quoted by John Newsinger, The Blood Never Dried: A People's History of the British Empire,  Bookmarks Publications 2006, pp. 113-14

Enlightenment! The London School of Economics has just named a building after Emmeline Pankhurst. From John Stuart Mill to Emmeline Pankhurst. J. S. Mill: The gigantic "federation" albeit "unequal", that was the British empire "has the advantage, especially valuable at the present time, of adding to the moral influence, and weight in the councils of the world, of the Power which, of all in existence, best understands liberty—and whatever may have been its errors in the past, has attained the more of conscience and moral principle in its dealings with foreigners than any other great nation seems either to conceive as possible or recognise as desirable." —Mill, Utilitarianism , London 1972 ed. p. 380 E. Pankhurst: "Some talk about the Empire and  Imperialism  as if  it were something to decry and something to be ashamed of. [I]t is a great thing to be the inheritors of  an Empire like ours ... great in territory, great in potential wealth...If w...

"The British curriculum dedicates plenty of attention to the violence of others - in Nazi Germany or during the American Civil War - and goes into great detail on a few events in medieval and pre-Victorian English history, like the Plague, the Great Fire of London, and the reign of Henry VIII. But a British school would not teach you anything about the brutality of British colonialism." It is time to teach colonial history in British schools

I have just finished reading Late Victorian Holocausts El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World It is an execellent book .  Some passages in chapter 8 are not easy and require some scientific knowledge of the field, but most of the book is a very good read.

What does Winston Churchill and Boris Johnson have in common? Very little and a lot. "Churchill had strong views on Gandhi. Commenting on the Mahatma's meeting with the viceroy of Indian, 1931, he had notoriously decalred: 'It is alarming and nauseating to see Mr Gandi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the east, striding half naked up the steps of the viceregal palace, while he is still organising and conducting a campaign of civil disobedience, to parlay in equal terms with the represnetative of the Emperor-King.' (Gandhi had nothing in common with fakirs, Muslim spiritual mendicants, but Churchill was rarely accurate about India.) 'Ghandi-ism and all what it stands for,' declared Churchill, 'will, sooner or later, have to be grappled with and finally crushed.' In such matters Churchill was the most reactionary of Englishmen, with views so extreme they cannot be excused as being reflective of their time...

The criminal Tony Blair has refused to personally apologise to the Libyan dissident Abdel Hakim Belhaj, who was tortured in a jail in Libya following a rendition operation mounted with the help of MI6 ... Compare that with this: "When Willy Brandt was chancellor of Germany, he sank to his knees at the Warsaw Ghetto in 1970 to apologize to Polish Jews for the Holocaust. There were hardly any Jews left in Poland, and Brandt, who as a socialist* [sic] was persecuted by the Nazis, was completely innocent of the crimes for which he was apologizing. But in doing so—with his historic kniefall von Warschau (Warsaw Genuflection), he was recongnizing the moral responsibility of the German people, whom he led as chancellor... Of course not everyone agrees that even atonement is due. Historian John Keay put it best: 'The conduct of states, as of individuals, can only assessed by the standards of their age, not by today's litigious criteria. Otherwise, we'd all be down on t...

From the Financial Times Brexit reinforces Britain's imperial amnesia

" Soon, the United Kingdom will consist of Buckingham Palace, the City, some satanic mills in the north and some desiccated farms elsewhere. So, the debate over the Empire has the soothing quality of a dream world in which it seems alive again, brought to life by the question of how bad, or occasionally good, it was." Empire of Ethics

The Real Winston Churchill

Celebrating empire: that woman on the ten-pound note. Jane Austen