Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Why Hollywood keeps churning out racist fantasies like 'Victoria & Abdul'?

The Museum of Colonialism

The Empire Stopper

" We must teach them a lesson in free trade " — Her Majesty the Queen

"Britain has built a national myth on winning the Second World War, but it's distorting our politics"

"At the start of the 18th century, India’s share of the global economy was 23 percent – the size of all of Europe combined. By the end of nearly 200 years of British rule, first under the proto-multinational corporation East India Company and then, after 1858, direct governance by the British crown, India’s share had dropped to just over 3 per cent, following the deliberate destruction of thriving local industries by the British. Perhaps most shocking is the section detailing the 30-35 million Indians who needlessly died in the series of famines under the British Raj, the most recent of which was the 1943-4 Bengal Famine. Tharoor calls these ‘British colonial holocausts’, comparing them to the 25 million people who perished in Stalin’s collectivisation drive and political purges." Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India

Like the carving of the Arab countries, here is another criminal legacy of the British Empire: "British judge Cyril Radcliffe was brought in to draw up the border between India and Pakistan. It meant cutting two of India's most powerful and populous provinces in half; Punjab and Bengal. Radcliffe had never been to India before and never returned. This rushed partition would have repercussions for decades to come." The Partition of India and Pakistan

"Young men in Asia and Africa often joined the army under duress. The war was fought for freedom, but Indian political demands were brushed aside in the 1940s, with nationalists enduring heavy-handed policing and imprisonment. The British state bungled food supply in its empire. In Britain, wartime food shortages caused hardship and great inconvenience; in India, they caused mass starvation. At least three million Bengalis died in a catastrophic famine in 1943, a famine that is almost never discussed. The famine's causes were a byproduct of the war, but as Madhusree Mukerjee has proved in her book "Churchill's Secret War," the imperial state also failed to deliver relief. Many soldiers signed up as volunteers to fill their bellies." Dunkirk, the War and the Amnesia of the Empire (NYT) A new Chinese nationalist action film

The British Empire's hidden history is one of resistance, not pride Further reading The History Thieves: Secrets, Lies and the Shaping of a Modern Nation by Ian Cobain and In the 1950s, the distinguished American sociologist Edward Shils decided that the explanation lay with a ruling class that was “unequalled in secretiveness and taciturnity”, whose members were so close and comfortable with one another that they had little fear of hidden secrets. Cobain largely supports this view. Class deference combined with a relatively benign and trusting view of the state’s behaviour may explain “why the peculiarly uncommunicative nature of the British state does not provoke greater resentment and unease among the British public and media”.  Quoted by Ian Jack, the Guardian

It is still embedded in their psychy The British Empire is "something to be proud of" Also One of the causes of Brexit is that there is " our country’s post-imperial reluctance to let go of the idea that we are a great nation, combined with our post-second-world-war delusion that we were still a great power. That was why we refused the chance to join the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951, and our infatuation with our own greatness was sufficiently undamaged by Suez in 1956 to make us refuse to join the EEC when that got going with the Treaty of Rome in 1958. If we’d committed ourselves to Europe early, with everyone else, we’d now have a much deeper understanding of our real relationship to the continent, namely that we belong there." — Philip Pullman

The Guardian's "progressive" Macron "During Netanyahu's official visit to Paris on Sunday, the French president condemned anti-Zionism as the new form of anti-Semitism. But what is the zionist project and how did it all begin?" Where it all began 

The crimes of Winston Churchill I recommend Churchill's Empire by Richard Toye Britain's Gulag by Caroline Elkins

This is a fantastic documentary. I watched it during a flight with Air France, but apparently it is not available free online. I guess it can be viewed using a " free trial ". The Adventures of Robert Fortune The Great British Tea Heist

A book review Inglorious Empire: what the British did to India

A new YouGov poll  has found the British public are generally proud of the British Empire and its colonial past.

Sunday between noon and 1pm on 104.4 FM (London) Or resonancefm.com (worldwide) Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould in conversation with C S Sung about Afghanistan's history pre-1960 in "Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story" (City Lights, 2009). The show was first broadcast by Against the Grain on KPFA Radio, Berkeley, US.