Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

"The prison camps are not just an anomaly from a nativist Trump administration, they are something that has been happening for years and years. I’m not only referring to short-term Border Patrol detention, but also the mass round-up, incarceration, expulsion, and banishment of non-citizens that has been happening in a sustained way in the United States since the 1990s, and through a variety of huge operations before then. And it’s not something that is just limited to the United States. While the concentration camp may vary from country to country, it is one of the cornerstones of a global border system designed to arrest and confine uprooted, displaced, and dispossessed people. Many are on the move because of the current global economic and political system (globalization and the free market neoliberal economic model) that has long privileged the wealthy elite and protected the interests of multinational corporations, all else be damned." Empire of the Borders

"It is thus a combination of economics, culture, religion, resources, and strategic location that drive the current repression of the Uyghur; the economic interests of Middle East countries prevent them from raising this issue with China." The Ongoing Persecutions of China's Uyghurs

  Nationalism "in any imperialist society is bound up with chauvinism, and Britain is an imperialist society, with England its historical core, which has always been defined by its status in the imperialist hierarchy, whatever William Hague says to the contrary.  Orwell’s efforts to situate the basis for socialism on the terrain of culture and “ Englishness ,” which admittedly had a certain proto-Gramscian quality in its approach to popular culture as a strategic factor in political struggles, surely represent the last serious attempt to articulate something like a left-wing “Englishness.”  It was certainly light years ahead of the mawkish, demagogic detritus that passes for the same attempt these days.  Yet it failed rather badly, for two reasons.  First, because it misjudged the class basis for any post-war socialism, estimating that the perpetual growth of a functionary and technician class would be the basis for a rational yet national post-capitalist syste...