Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Theoretical laziness

By 1900 the Victorian empire upon which the sun never set included 11 million square miles and 390 million people. In the course of European expansion, the Andean and Mesoamerican civilizations were effectively eliminated, Indian and Islamic civilizations along with Africa were subjugated, and China was penetrated and subordinated to Western influence. Only Russian, Japanese, and Ethiopian civilizations, all three governed by highly centralized imperial authorities, were able to resist the onslaught of the West and maintain meaning­ful independent existence. For four hundred years intercivilizational relations consisted of the subordination of other societies to Western civilization. The causes of this unique and dramatic development included the social structure and class relations of the West, the rise of cities and commerce, the relative dispersion of power in Western societies between estates and monarchs and secular and religious authorities, the emerging sense of national cons...

Before the next attack Once examined, the terms 'British values' and 'Western values' unspool into a sequence of connotative links connecting territory, birth and culture in a roughly 'historicist' manner.  It is a given that 'the West', for example, is not a geographical entity so much as a historically produced caste of national states comprising Europe and its colonies, from North America to Australasia.  This white West is connected to its supposed values through the crucial vector of culture.  Thus, it just so happens that white people are the legatees of a particular level of civilizational and cultural development that give them these unique, priceless assets such as democracy.  This necessitates forgetting how passionately and often violently democracy was resisted within the social formations of 'the West', as well as how much modern democratic revolutions owed to the decidedly 'non-Western' Haiti.  But the link between terri...

" A lot of truth in this . But there is a real problem with the tendency to see all this in terms of ‘turning away from western values’-as if fascism wasn’t a western value-as if justice was the sole possession of the west-as if movements for democracy were all about a desire to be western. In so many ways this whole discourse is part of the problem-people who have never expanded their universalism beyond a constricted eurocentric post-war vision. I do think we’re confronted by discursively similar discourses in this respect-both flowing out of an amazing theoretical laziness and ennui." — John Gamey Indeed, is Germany's complicity with Isreal in crimes a Western value or not? The decades long of Western states support of dictatorships in the Middle East, North Africa and elsewhere a Western value or not? Is the state of Europe today, including the consequences of neolibral capitalism, the rise of the far-right, corruption, relentless privatisation, curtailing unions ...

“ This will repeat in other places ,” Dr. Monzer Khalil, a health official in rebel-held Idlib, said a day after treating victims of the recent chemical attack. “If Europe and America are honest, to preserve the values they are defending, they should fight this oppression. There should be political pressure on the regime.” >> One of many ways to perpetuate oppression is for "the oppressed people" themselves, consciously or unsonciously, to believe in crap.